While denying large-scale burial of bodies on river banks in some Uttar Pradesh districts, state officials on Thursday said they were monitoring the banks to prevent dumping of bodies in the rivers.
The decision to monitor the river banks comes after hundreds of corpses were found floating in the Ganga at Buxar district in Bihar and Ballia and Ghazipur districts in UP.
''It (dumping bodies in rivers) is not our tradition... the dead should be cremated in accordance with the rituals... they must not be buried on the river banks,'' Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said.
Eyewitness accounts said hundreds of corpses had been buried in pits barely three to four feet deep in the sand. These bodies could be swept downstream in the rainy season, when the river is in spate and breaches its banks.
The officials also rejected reports of a large number of deaths from coronavirus infection in the rural areas in the state. ''We do not have any such report,'' said a senior health official here on Thursday.
Reports of deaths, however, continued to pour in from villages in the state. The worst-hit are the districts of Gorakhpur, Deoria, Raebareli, Varanasi, Sultanpur, Meerut and some others.
Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra demanded a judicial probe into the deaths in the rural areas and the dumping of bodies in the rivers. ''The state government is busy in image building... it is hiding the data on deaths... a judicial probe must be conducted into the reports,'' Priyanka said.
(Published 13 May 2021, 13:10 IST)
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