Ground Report | New Delhi: Over the past few weeks, the country has watched in horror, unidentified corpses stranded along the banks of the Ganges. Such cases have mostly been reported from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and although not yet officially recognized, it is believed that these are the bodies of people who have died from COVID-19 .
Now a similar case has been reported from Uttarakhand. As reported by ANI, dozens of bodies, believed to be victims of COVID-19, were seen scattered on the banks of the Sarayu river in Pithoragarh, Uttarakhand.
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Local residents are worried that the water will be polluted which will further lead to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 disease as 30 kilometers from where the bodies float is the district head office, which gets its drinking water supply from the river.
Many are concerned about the spread of COVID-19 as cases were at an all-time high earlier this month.
Pankaj Chandola, the district tehsildar who oversees the cremation of COVID patients in the Ghat area, said that the bodies that flowed into the Saryu river did not come from Pithoragarh. “The areas where the bodies are floating are not from Pithoragarh. They have not been identified and investigations are underway where the bodies came from,” Chandola said.
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Local residents also raised objections to the cremation of the bodies of Covid victims in open areas because they feared the spread of the infection further. Earlier this month, a large number of unclaimed bodies were found on the banks of the Ganga River in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, leading to a game of blame between the two states.
Although hundreds of bodies were found in the two states, the exact number of bodies dumped into the river is unclear. In Bihar, it has reached the point where the government has to lay a net in Ganga in Ranighat, bordering UP and Bihar, to stop the flow of bodies from neighboring countries.
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