Graves crumple along Ganga as water level rises, bodies float around in UP

Lucknow: Masses of bodies buried along the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh began to float into the open as the sandbanks crumple due to rising waters in the advancing monsoon, reports NDTV. The Prayagraj town authorities were caught in local journalists' lenses, collecting floating dead bodies' suspected of Covid-19 patients' and cremating them for the last two days.

NDTV reports that a photograph taken on Wednesday showed a body shrouded in saffron, sticking out a gloved hand out of it. Another video was found in which a shrouded body was recovered by two men and placed on the sandbank. More footages of a similar kind were found in which recovered bodies were being cremated.

According to Niraj Kumar Singh, a zonal officer of the Prayagraj Municipal Corporation, he had cremated 40 bodies in the last 24 hours and cremated them individually, following all rituals. When he was asked about a body wearing an oxygen mask, he admitted that the person must have been ill before death. He added that the family might have dumped the person there out of fear.

Not all bodies were found decomposed from which is evident that some were freshly buried.

Abhilasha Gupta Nandi, Prayagraj's Mayor, was also found in footages, helping with the cremations said that many communities in the state had the tradition of burying their dead in the Ganga banks. He said that those buried in the mud decomposes, but those within the sands tend to be preserved. He assured that wherever they find exposed bodies, they are carrying out cremations.

Visuals of Mass shallow graves along the river Ganga went viral, generating international headlines, last May. Masses of bodies washed ashore eastern UP and downstream in Bihar while the second wave of pandemic shook the country. It was suspected that the death count in UP was critically under-reported, and the gruesome visuals of floating bodies generated immense outrage. But the UP government denied that deaths were out of covid and reiterated the claim that burial by the river is a long-standing tradition.