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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | In UP’s Vast Agra District, Govt Ensures Death & Pandemic Go Unrecorded -Ashutosh Bhardwaj

In UP’s Vast Agra District, Govt Ensures Death & Pandemic Go Unrecorded -Ashutosh Bhardwaj

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published Published on May 12, 2021   modified Modified on May 13, 2021

-Article-14.com

In the sprawling rural hinterland beyond the Taj Mahal, in a region dotted with hospitals, we found a deluge of unreported and unrecorded sickness and death, because the administration of chief minister Yogi Adityanath discourages record keeping, restricts testing and insists the pandemic is under control.

Agra (Uttar Pradesh): In normal times, only a few bodies were cremated every week at the Poiya Ghat crematorium in rural Agra, 12 km and a world away from the glistening Taj Mahal. On 19 April, as two pyres burned, Article 14 asked a young man—who, having finished his work day in an adjoining farmland, was returning to his village—if these were Covid-19 victims.

“We don’t have corona in our villages,” the man shrugged, echoing a widespread public feeling, reinforced by frequent declarations by UP’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister Yogi Adityanath (here and here) that the global pandemic was not an issue of concern in India’s most-populous state with, as Article 14 has reported, some of its worst health infrastructure.

On 27 April—a day after Adityanath said there were no oxygen shortages in his state—there were some 40 pyres, large crowds and queues of the dead, most wrapped in cadaver bags, marking them as victims of the virus. A shopkeeper nearby said that he had watched nearly 45 bodies arriving over the past “few days”, meaning about three or four days.

The scenes at the Poiya Ghat crematorium were repeated across Agra district, the largest by population in western UP—at 4,041 sq km, it is the size of Goa and Bengaluru city combined—with 93% of its land classified as rural. Elected representatives in village after village told Article 14 that sudden fevers and a deluge of death followed a few days after the panchayat or local polls on 15 April.

About 330 km to the east in the state capital of Lucknow, the view from the highest echelons of administration was substantially different. “The situation is getting better with the infection rate decreasing and the recovery rate increasing,” Adityanath said on 2 May.

The death and devastation in rural Agra contradicts every claim the chief minister makes about the pandemic, which goes mostly undetected and unreported, not only because medical facilities are overwhelmed but because the government is not registering the dead in official records.

Yet, even official data reveal the speed of the second Covid wave after spreader events.

On 15 March, Agra district reported zero Covid-19 patients. Cases began rising around Holi, in the last week of March, then swiftly climbed after the panchayat polls. Since then, the district has registered 22,699 cases and 260 deaths. About half the cases, 11,848, and 81 deaths were recorded over 35 days to 5 May. And these are clearly undercounts.

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Article-14.com, 12 May, 2021, https://www.article-14.com/post/in-up-s-vast-agra-district-govt-ensures-death-pandemic-go-unrecorded


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