Stench of death pervades rural India as Ganges swells with Covid victims
India’s official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic may be just over a quarter of a million, 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 Covid dead.
On Wednesday, India reported another record number of deaths, 4,529, as the virus continued to spread out of the big cities and into rural areas.
There is, however, no official record of the number of bodies that have been found over the past two weeks in the stretch of the Ganges that flows through the poor rural states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, or buried in shallow sandy graves along the riverbank in Uttar Pradesh. Locals and journalists who have counted put the figure at more than 2,000….
