Mass graves uncovered after Ganga water recedes in UP’s Prayagraj: Report

With a rise in the water level of Ganga in Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj, several dead bodies have floated up. A video report by a TV channel showed the authorities fishing out the bodies.

Dead bodies, suspected to be of COVID-19 patients, have come up after the sandbanks along the river crumbled.

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According to the NDTV report, a photograph taken on Wednesday showed a body stuck on the riverbank. Other visuals showed two men recovering a shrouded body from the river and placing it on the sandbank.

When asked by reporters, Niraj Kumar Singh, a zonal officer for the Prayagraj Municipal Corporation, said that he had cremated 40 bodies in 24 hours.

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“You can see that the person was ill, and the family dumped the person here and went away. Maybe they were scared, I cannot say. Not all the bodies were decomposed. The condition of some indicated they were freshly buried,” Singh said, as per the report.

These visuals pose some difficult questions to the authorities in Uttar Pradesh, especially after hundreds of corpses were found floating in the river or buried in the sand of its banks last month. With monsoon and floods, corpses are likely to float on the surface of Ganga, one of India’s holiest rivers.