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Death, Disbelief & An Odd Resistance In UP’s Rural Hinterland -Pooja Pande/ Khabar Lahariya

-Article-14.com

Scepticism about Covid-19. Lack of smartphones, health information and healthcare. Resistance to vaccination. We found a perfect storm devastating the poor, southwestern interiors of India’s most-populous state.

Banda (Uttar Pradesh): “At least one person in every household here is extremely unwell.”

Shivdevi, who uses only one name, has over a decade’s professional experience as a journalist and has been reporting from rural Bundelkhand in southwestern Uttar Pradesh (UP) for the women-run, grassroots news network Khabar Lahariya (KL).

Her assessment of the pandemic in her native village of Bhawanipur in Banda district, appears, at first, to mirror the situation in urban, middle-class India. Then, the qualification follows: “Not one person here knows or cares or believes in corona.”

Covid-19 might be the great equaliser in a world of haves and have-nots, but in the rural hinterland of India’s most-populous state and second-poorest by per capita income, decades of social and systemic backwardness among its 155 million rural populace has made the second wave particularly deadly.

Years of living without specialised or even accessible primary healthcare has led to a certain inevitability about illness, disease and death, a fact particularly evident during this pandemic.

On 19 May 2021, India’s official death toll exceeded 270,000 but the global, scientific consensus is that this is an underestimate (here and here), with the real toll perhaps a million dead.

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