Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Seasonal flooding of the Ganges River, India, has an impact on the graves in Allahabad. As a result, hundreds of bodies buried on the banks of rivers during the recent Covid-19 wave in India are clearly visible.
Neeraj Kumar Singh, an official in Allahabad, said that nearly 150 bodies had to be cremated in the last three weeks because of the flooding.
“We are not excavating bodies but only bodies floating due to rising water levels being cremated. The area is spread over a kilometer and we estimate there are around 500-600 bodies buried,” Neeraj said.
“Every precaution was taken in handling the corpses while performing their final rites,” he added.
According to The Straits Times, the bodies buried on the banks of the Ganges River are mostly believed to have died from Covid-19. They were buried as India was hit by a spike in infections that flooded hospitals in many areas in April and May.
Some families cannot afford firewood for the traditional Hindu cremation procession so the bodies are buried in the Ganges River or buried in sandbars adjacent to the river.
But the river is flooded by the annual monsoon rains, washing away the sand and making corpses appear. The number of such graves fuels suspicions India’s total death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic may be more than a million, several times the official figure of nearly 400,000.
India has now recorded more than 30.2 million cases of Covid-19 infection, with more than 395,000 deaths, according to Worldometers data as of Sunday (27/6/2021).
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