According to villagers, on Sunday, at Charitravan Ghat, seven bodies were consigned to the flames and 16 were thrown into the Ganga; at Mahadeva ghat,16 bodies were dumped and nine cremated. With the COVID fatalities going up, the price of material required for last rites has also witnessed a spike; the poor villagers don’t have deep enough pockets to even give the relatives a decent send-off.
Nand Kishore Ram, a Dalit leader and a former MLA, told the Free Press Journal: “In our community, people are burying the bodies of Corona victims as they cannot afford the expensive last rites. Also, there is a problem of paucity of space in the two cremation grounds, where normally six to seven bodies are cremated every day; this figure has touched a shocking 100. There is an acute shortage of wooden logs owing to the back-to-back cremations. Those who facilitate the last rites often demand Rs 5000 to Rs 10,000 per body.
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