Mon, May 24, 2021 page7

• Stench of death pervades rural India as Ganges swells with COVID-19 victims

  Stigmatization and the cost of wood leave families with no choice but to dispose of their dead in the holy river

  • By Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Saurabh Sharma / The Guardian, GHAZIPUR, India
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  There was another time when the Ganges River was “swollen with dead bodies.” In 1918, when the great flu pandemic swept through India and killed an estimated 18 million people, the water of this river — upon which so many lives depended — was filled with the stench of death.

  So it is again. India’s official death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic might be slightly more than 250,000, but experts believe the real figure to be up to five times higher, and the bodies that have begun washing up in India’s holiest river have become haunting representations of the uncounted dead.

  On Wednesday last week, India reported another record number of deaths, 4,529, as the virus continued to spread out of the big cities and into rural areas.

  

  Illustration: Yusha

  However, there is no official record of the number of bodies that have been found over the past two weeks in the stretch of the Ganges River that flows through the poor rural states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, or buried in shallow graves along the riverbank in Uttar Pradesh. Locals and journalists who did some of the counting estimated the figure at more than 2,000.

  In the Uttar Pradesh village of Gahmar, Raju Chaudhry, 15, who works on fishing boats, said he had seen “around 50 bodies a day washing up, over many days.”

  There is no way to know if all were infected with COVID-19, although the government has accepted that some are victims of the virus. It is widely believed that as the vicious second wave of infection has ripped through the poor rural communities of Uttar Pradesh, leaving death in its wake, stigma around the virus and the high cost of firewood for cremation have forced many families to resort to the custom of immersing the shrouded bodies into the holy waters of the Ganges River. Others have buried them on the river’s sandy banks.

  Officially, death and infection rates in Gahmar are low, but Bhupendra Upadhyay, a local priest sitting beneath a banyan tree on the ghat — a flight of steps leading down to the river — said that several people had died in the past few weeks.

  “I have seen 30 to 35 bodies brought to the river recently and immersed here. More are doing immersion because people have found it hard to arrange cremation when so many people are dying,” he said.

  Upadhyay pointed to the trunk of the banyan tree, to which dozens of clay pots were tied.

  “Each of those pots represents someone who has died,” he said. “Look how many there are, just from the last 10 days.”

  Police have been stationed along the river to stop immersions and said they had cleared most of the bodies from the water, even putting nets across the river on the border of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

  However, around Narva ghat in Gahmar, many were still visible. As a body slowly emerged into view, carried by the slow current of the river, cries rang out. Scattered across a bank of the river were three more, each meters apart, still shrouded in cloth and entangled in the detritus of the river.

  A brief boat trip upstream revealed dozens more bodies in the water and along the bank, in varying states of decay, and picked at by birds and wild dogs.

  RIVER ONLY OPTION

  Those who immersed the bodies said they had little choice.

  Sitting in the courtyard of a ramshackle family home, where 20 people live under one roof, Narsingh Kumar spoke of his two older brothers who died days apart. Although they had not been tested for COVID-19, the brothers died less than two days after showing symptoms.

  The first brother, Shambhu Nath, developed a high fever on April 19 and three days later he was struggling to breathe. An ambulance was called on April 23, but he died on the way to hospital.

  That same day, his brother, Swami Nath, also began to have breathing difficulties. He was taken to a private hospital and put on oxygen for a night before being discharged, but died the next day.

  In the case of Shambhu Nath, the family had no difficulties with cremation, with villagers offering help and attending the funeral, but after the second brother died, they found themselves as outcasts among their neighbors.

  “When we tried to buy firewood for the cremation, we were shooed away and no one in the village would help us,” Kumar said.

  His neighbors suspected COVID-19 after the second death and shunned the family.

  “We couldn’t get any wood and didn’t know what else to do, so we had no choice but to immerse his body into the river. We did it the next morning at 11am with just close family,” he said.

  INADEQUATE CARE

  The toll of the pandemic on India’s rural villages, home to 65 percent of the country’s population, and where basic healthcare is lacking or absent, might never be known.

  In Uttar Pradesh, where the population of 235 million exceeds that of Brazil, rural villages across the state have reported people dying in droves within days of getting a cough or a fever, or experiencing shortness of breath, without ever getting a COVID-19 test. The government has begun door-to-door testing in villages, although the testing has not arrived in many remote areas.

  In Sauram village, in the Ghazipur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, locals said the situation was frightening.

  “In the last 25 days, we have heard of 17 deaths in the village,” said Manoj Kumar Jaiswal, the husband of the village head.

  “Ninety percent of people in this village are sick. Every household has someone who has a cough or a fever. Many people in the village are getting a temperature [and a] cough, and they die within a day or two,” he said.

  No one in the village was being tested for COVID-19, even when they went to local hospitals, Jaiswal said.

  “I am scared because we don’t know why this is happening,” he said.

  Mohammad Iqbal, 42, who runs a grocery store in Sauram, described how his mother, Tara Begum, 55, had fallen sick on May 4 with a cough and a fever. As she struggled to breathe, he took her to the nearby private Shivangi Hospital, where she was put on oxygen. She died the next morning.

  “The doctors didn’t tell me the cause of death, but they said that four or five people had died in the hospital that morning,” Iqbal said.

  “There was no corona test done for her at the hospital and no tests are being done in the village, so how can we know if corona is here? All I know is that I have never seen so many people dying,” he said.

  The dire state of the healthcare accessible to the residents of Sauram and neighboring villages was evident in a visit to Shivangi Hospital, where many in the village displaying COVID-19 symptoms had been treated at a steep cost. It was now emptied of patients and the doctor running it had “gone away.”

  Raju Kushwaha, a second-year student in traditional Ayurvedic medicine who had been treating patients at Shivangi Hospital, said he had never knowingly treated a COVID-19 patient because no one had been tested.

  “We admitted many patients who were breathless and kept them on oxygen support,” Kushwaha said.

  He acknowledged that many older people would have died after the hospital had discharged them with low oxygen levels.

  “The hospital has not kept any records of patients who have come in recent weeks,” he said.

  Meanwhile, the local public health center in Ghazipur, the first medical point of contact for most rural villagers, was deserted one evening, and the “on-call doctor” was just a local pharmacist.

  The Uttar Pradesh government has said it is carrying out door-to-door testing in 97,000 villages and has launched an “aggressive trace, test, track and treat policy” that has reduced cases by more than 100,000 in recent days, as well as adding 100,000 hospital beds. Families of the dead are also being given 5,000 rupees (US$69) for cremation costs.

  “Even after being infected with coronavirus himself, the chief minister has been traveling to the countryside to monitor the situation. Our model is better than any other model in the country,” a government spokesperson said.

  Yet for those families grieving the dead in Sauram, it has been an added indignity that their loved ones are not going to be counted as official victims of the pandemic. For Radhe Shayam, 64, a farmer whose wife, Jagrani Devi, 60, died earlier this month after experiencing breathlessness and severe lung damage, government action had come too late.

  “We did our best,” Shayam said. “We did everything the doctors told us to, but we could not save her. If she had been tested for coronavirus and given proper treatment in hospitals rather than sent home twice, maybe she would be alive.”
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