Besides, 199 deaths since Monday morning took the death toll to 160,166. This is the highest number of deaths in a day this year so far.

There are still 345,377 active cases in the country, while 11,181,253 people have been discharged so far from hospitals after medical treatment.

There was an increase of 10,731 active cases during the previous 24 hours, out of which a maximum of 5,124 cases were reported from the southwestern state of Maharashtra.

The number of daily active cases has been on the rise over the past few days, even as another wave of COVID-19 looms large in India.

In January the number of daily cases in the country had come down to below-10,000. As many as 9,102 new cases were reported between January 25-26, which was the lowest in the previous 237 days. Prior to that the lowest number of daily new cases were 9,304 registered on June 4, 2020.

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January 16 was a crucial day in India's fight against the pandemic as the nationwide vaccination drive was kicked off during the day. So far over 48 million people have been vaccinated across the country.

Meanwhile, the federal government has ramped up COVID-19 testing facilities across the country, even as more than 235 million tests have been conducted so far.

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As many as 235,413,233 were conducted till Monday, out of which 880,655 tests were conducted on Monday alone, said the latest data issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Tuesday.