Cause-of-death information that is important for public health planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation is lacking in India because of home-based deaths and a weak civil registration system and medical certification of cause-of-death system. In the Million Deaths Study (1998-2014), 14 million people in 2.4 million nationally representative Indian households are followed up for vital status and, if dead, the causes of death is determined through a well-validated verbal autopsy (VA) instrument that will be coded by two physicians. During the first phase of the study (1998-2003), the division was the nodal centre for the state of Karnataka as well as being the regional training centre for Verbal Autopsy training for research assistants and training in cause of death assignment & ICD-10 coding for physicians. This study conducted with the Registrar General of India and the Centre for Global Health Research at St Michael’s Hospital, University of Toronto, Canada, has yielded the first ever nationally-representative statistics on the causes of death by age, sex, urban-rural residence and by geographic region of the country.