There is, however, no official record of the number of bodies that have been found over the past two weeks in the stretch of the Ganges that flows through the poor rural states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, or buried in shallow sandy graves along the riverbank in Uttar Pradesh. In the Uttar Pradesh village of Gahmar, Raju Chaudhry, 15, who works on the fishing boats, said recently he had seen “around 50 bodies a day washing up, over many days”. There is no way to know if all were infected with coronavirus, though the government has accepted some are Covid victims. Pots hang from the trunk of a banyan tree by the Ganges in Gahmar to represent the recently dead. In Sauram village, in the Ghazipur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, locals described the situation as “very scary”.

Source: The Guardian May 20, 2021 00:00 UTC