Ground Report: How the Banks of the Ganga Bore Witness to a Summer of Death and Despair

This story forms part of The Wire’s series, “Breathless,” which revisits the impact of the second wave of COVID-19 in India.

Varanasi/Prayagraj (Uttar Pradesh): Late one night in the summer of 2021, 30-year-old Deepak Chaubey stood for hours in a serpentine queue at Varanasi’s Harishchandra Ghat and witnessed “humanity fade.” He jostled for space to cremate his father even as he struggled to come to terms with his sudden demise. Not far from Chaubey, in Puari Khurd village, 15-year-old Sanjana Bhardwaj was scrambling for money for her father’s funeral. Meanwhile, Nishu*, a crematorium worker at Harishchandra Ghat, was toiling relentlessly around the clock with barely any breaks in between, even for a meal. A few kilometres away in the village of Rampur, Narendra Kumar Nishad, a Ganga Prahari with the National Mission for Clean Ganga, was beginning to get accustomed to panicked calls from his colleagues as the river returned the dead. Manish Mishra, a journalist with Hindi daily Danik Bhaskar, woke up convinced that he was on a ventilator. He kept screaming to his wife that he couldn’t breathe. He was having a nightmare. He had been reporting from inside hospital wards, intensive-care units and cremation grounds for days.

Between April and June 2021, as the devastating second wave of COVID-19 killed lakhs of people across India, Uttar Pradesh was among the worst-affected states in the country. The Ganga, swollen with decomposing bodies that were adrift in the river and tossed onto its shores, became a symbol for the mismanaged health crisis. According to an analysis by the human-rights organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace, there were an estimated 14 lakh excess deaths during the pandemic in the state of Uttar Pradesh alone — about 60 times the official death toll of 23,000. The numbers cannot fully capture the grief of individual losses, or the effects that rippled through the lives of the people left behind.

In May this year, I travelled through numerous villages along the banks of Ganga. The river flowed placidly, it was as though the turbulence it had been the site of had been washed away. I met over a dozen people, including front-line workers, family members of those who had died of COVID-19, journalists who had reported from the ground. Three years after the second wave, the pandemic appeared to have become a distant echo in collective memory. For most people, it was a nightmare they preferred to forget. Yet, as we sifted through their recollections of that time, traces of its profound impact emerged. Shyam Babu Yadav, a shopkeeper who sold provisions for funeral rituals in Prayagraj, said, “I won’t be able to forget the pandemic for as long as I am alive.”

What the Ganga revealed

At about 7 am on May 16, 2021, Narendra woke up to a strange call — a corpse had been found on the banks of the Ganga in Rampur village. His colleague urged him to make haste. “Nobody is touching the body, there is panic here. Please rush.”

Narendra had been working as a Ganga Prahari with the National Mission for Clean Ganga since 2017. He has a team of local volunteers across several villages, most of whom were from the Mallah sub-caste — classified as an Other Backward Classes (OBC) community. As the second wave engulfed Uttar Pradesh, government officials instructed all volunteers to be vigilant about bodies in and around the river.

Narendra disconnected the call, picked up his mask and gloves, and started walking down the narrow, circuitous path bordering the river bank. Rampur was seven kilometres away from his home in Dhakwa. Since there was a lockdown, he had no option but to cover the distance by foot. The village head was too scared to touch the body. He refused to take any action till Narendra reached.

When Narendra arrived, he saw the corpse of a woman shrouded in a white cloth. She looked like she was in her mid-20s or early-30s. Her body had been placed at the end of the road that led to the village.

Narendra dialled 112 — the emergency number for the police — and contacted the nearest station in Chaubeypur. The Station House Officer came there along with a team of officials and examined the body for any signs of injuries. Once they had determined that the death was natural, they called a JCB vehicle. Then, a group of people dug up a portion of the field. Since the body was unidentified and crematorium workers were not close by, they buried the young woman.

Villagers who gathered to witness the scene whispered to each other in panic. “What if the virus spreads more and the village becomes a hotspot now?” Just that day, India recorded above 4,000 official deaths.

Through this time, grave shortages of ambulances, hospital beds in intensive-care units, and ventilators abounded in Uttar Pradesh. By early May, the Allahabad high court took cognisance of news reports that highlighted the lack of adequate oxygen for patients in various hospitals across the state. Their deaths, it observed were “not less than a genocide”. In rural areas, overburdened healthcare systems often meant that those infected could not even consider the possibility of timely tests or treatment. Those who passed away in their homes were unaccounted for in state records relating to deaths caused by the virus. Crematoria and burial grounds were stretched beyond capacity. The Ganga, swollen with unidentified corpses, became a symbol of the state’s failures in addressing the health crisis.

Led by the chief minister of the state, Ajay Mohan Singh Bisht, or Adityanath as he is popularly known, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government buried its head in the sand. The government cited official figures, widely understood to be conservative, to downplay the catastrophe. It threatened to invoke authoritarian laws against “anti-social elements”, who spread “rumours”, and tried to “spoil the atmosphere”.

The fear triggered by the body of the young woman reverberated through Rampur and villages around it — so much so that the pradhan called Narendra after a week. He asked him to meet with and pacify residents. Calming their fears, Narendra emphasised the importance of following government protocols of wearing masks, sanitising and maintaining social distance.

Soon Narendra was inundated by a deluge of similar calls — through night and day, in the searing heat, from distant places and nearby shanties. Bodies turned up in the river, on the banks, by the wayside.

In one such incident, a colleague in Sarasaul village reached out. A corpse was drifting in the river. “We don’t have permission to stop, touch the bodies. We had to inform our seniors and act accordingly,” Narendra told The Wire. “By the time I got instructions from the top, the body had floated away.”

Around this time, Dainik Bhaskar sent 30 reporters and photojournalists along the banks of the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh’s cities and districts. The results, published on May 15, were damning. The paper found over 2,000 bodies buried or floating across a 1,140 kilometre stretch along the river.

Manish Mishra was also reporting from the field during this period. He recalled standing on the Phaphamau bridge in Prayagraj and counting the bodies that were being buried. “There was no space left on the ground,” Mishra said. “One body would be buried almost on top of another.”

At Phaphamau ghat, Lallan was one among an informal community of divers who eked out a living by routinely plunging into the water, retrieving coins, trinkets, all manner of lost items, and even bodies. During the second wave, Lallan, who is from the marginalised Pasi Dalit community, was told by administrative officials to watch out for any corpses floating along the banks.

Whenever Lallan spotted a body, he informed the authorities so that a team of volunteers could retrieve it.“The river keeps shifting its course – even previously buried bodies were showing up or floating in the river,” he told The Wire. By the end of the second wave, he had counted a total of 400. He was not paid any regular wages for this work.

Even before the pandemic, there were graves along the banks of the Ganga — poor people from nearby villages buried their dead because they couldn’t buy wood for cremations. “But the numbers swelled during the second wave,” Lallan said.

One day, Lallan recalled, ambulances ferrying bodies arrived at the ghat every five minutes. “The sight still haunts me. I fled from the scene and returned to the ghat only after 15 days,” he said. Even then, he could only bring himself to sit on the edge of the river, far from the crowd.

“I would watch incessant flames from the funeral pyres envelope the entire ghat,” he recalled. “I hope to God that I never get to see such a scene again.”

The hunt for oxygen, and for hope

Deepak Chaubey’s father, Shiv Pratap Chaubey, was a social worker and the inspiration behind Deepak joining a human rights NGO. “When everyone around was hiding in their homes during the pandemic, he wanted to serve the poor. In the first lockdown, he was going around villages distributing rations and food to those who were left stranded and hungry,” Deepak recalled. When the second wave came, he said, his father was “coordinating the distribution of masks and sanitisers, and campaigning to create awareness about vaccines in villages”.

In the first week of April 2021, Shiv Pratap developed a high fever. The family consulted their regular physician, who prescribed some flu medication. “My father was weak, but he was functional,” Deepak recollected. Around April 15-16, when Shiv Pratap’s illness showed no signs of abating, his family booked a diagnostic test.

Even as Shiv Pratap awaited his test results, his oxygen levels started dropping, a teary-eyed Deepak recalled. “It was two days after his samples were collected. My father had just woken up from his afternoon nap when he started complaining of severe chest pain,” he said.

His family called the Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay Government Hospital in Varanasi. But the hospital could not admit a patient without a test report that confirmed he was a COVID-19 patient.

They then tried to arrange oxygen cylinders.

“Initially, we were thinking that anyone who is going to the hospital is not returning, so we wanted to treat him at home. But we had no luck,” Deepak told The Wire. Frenetic calls to private hospitals yielded no results. Finally, one facility, located near the highway leading to Ghazipur, said it had one bed. “When we reached the place, we saw it was a building with a shutter,” Deepak said.

They had no other choice. They waited for an hour, only to be told there were no empty beds after all. A diagnostic test at the hospital confirmed that Deepak’s father had contracted COVID-19. “I could see my father’s morale dropping. It was as if he lost all hope,” he recalled.

Deepak and his elder brother persisted. They found a bed in Sangam Hospital on the Shivpur road in Varanasi. “The hospital was asking us for Rs 50,000 cash then and there. None of us had cash,” he said. The family pleaded with the hospital authorities  for a long time before they relented. Shiv Pratap was admitted to the intensive-care unit at around 10 pm.

Two days later, his condition deteriorated. A chest scan revealed 90% congestion. Deepak was told to procure an injection for the antiviral drug Remdesivir, which was thought to be a possible course of treatment for COVID-19 patients. Conflicting information didn’t help matters. A family friend, a senior doctor at Deen Dayal hospital, told Deepak that “there was no point of the injection”.

At that time, India faced a massive shortage of Remdesivir even though its efficacy in treating COVID-19 infections was in contention. The surge in demand led to desperate SOS calls on social media, black market sales and exorbitant rates. A government advisory released on April 23, 2021 cautioned against its misuse, underscoring that Remdesivir was “only an experimental drug with potential to harm”.

Deepak was desperate — his father’s life was on the line. If this was the last recourse, then he would take it. He made a call to Sir Sunderlal Hospital, affiliated with the Banaras Hindu University. The person in-charge of distribution of the drug there told him the injections could be arranged at the government-capped price only by the next morning.

The next morning wouldn’t do, Deepak needed an injection immediately. “Someone gave me the number of a private dealer who was selling the drug in black. He started quoting from Rs 85,000 for one injection,” he recalled. Eventually, Deepak found someone who was willing to sell it for Rs 25,000. The standard price for these injections, after government intervention in April 2021, was supposed to range between Rs 899 to Rs 3,500.

It didn’t work. Shiv Pratap grew weaker. “The doctor told me he had to be put on a ventilator. My father, who could hear the conversation, kept signalling to me to not go for the ventilator,” Deepak told The Wire. “He told me there was no point.” But Deepak’s elder brother was insistent. He signed off on the approval for the ventilator on his father’s behalf.

Just as the ward boy entered the room with the machine, Deepak recalled, he noticed his father’s pulse drop to zero. “The line was straight. There was no heartbeat,” he said.

Deepak punched the table in front of him, agitated. “Can you believe, even at that moment the hospital staff was insisting that my father was alive and he would be fine if we put him on ventilator support,” he said. “What kind of human beings think of making money in the face of a tragedy?”

On April 26, seven days after Shiv Pratap’s demise, his family received his test results as they were making preparations for a ceremony to mourn him. The report was inconclusive — it asked for a resampling.

Mounting debts

Deepak believed that the panchayat elections, which were held from April 15 to 29, 2021, exacerbated an already serious situation. “COVID-19 spread like wildfire because so many people were moving in and out of villages for the polls,” he told The Wire.

The toll of those polls is well-documented. Tens of thousands of school teachers and other government employees were sent out for compulsory election duty during this time. On April 29, the Uttar Pradesh Prathamik Shikshak Sangh, which claims to represent nearly five lakh teachers, wrote to the Election Commission and asked for the ballot counting to be postponed. It compiled a list of 706 teachers who had died after polling duty. There was no response. By mid-May, an updated list showed that this number had climbed up to 1,621 teachers. The UP government dismissed this figure, claiming that only three teachers had died.

For 15-year-old Sanjana Bhardwaj, the panchayat polls of April 2021 meant that her family could perform her father’s last rites. A daily-wage labourer, he had been suffering from symptoms of COVID-19 for weeks.

A Community Health Centre (CHC) was located in the nearby village of Puari Kala, about ten minutes away. But hardly anyone went there. “Villagers perceive that going to a government health centre would be of little use…we go to the CHC sometimes when we have minor illnesses,” Bhardwaj said.

Meena Devi, who had been working as an ASHA, an Accredited Social Health Activist, for the last 17 years at the Puari Kala CHC, recalled going to different villages under her jurisdiction during the pandemic. She created awareness about social distancing and masking protocols as well as stressed the importance of vaccination. “It was very difficult to convince the villagers to take the vaccine. They were scared and hesitant,” she recalled. The work was exhausting and high-risk.

Reeta Devi, an auxiliary nurse and midwife at the same health centre, spent hours in the field everyday. “We would be so scared to visit people’s homes during the intense second wave, but we didn’t have an option,” she recalled. “We ourselves never got tested and kept working day-in and day-out.” ASHA workers acted as a vital bridge between the community and government healthcare services, Shruti Nagvanshi, a health activist based in Varanasi, pointed out. Yet, their working conditions were abysmal and many of them didn’t even get protective gear. “Their stipends are very meagre,” Nagvanshi said.

When Bhardwaj’s father fell sick, the family opted to take him to a private hospital directly. Her mother incurred a debt of Rs 3-3.5 lakh during his treatment. By the time his test report came, he had an hour left to live.

“He was the only earning member in the family,” Bhardwaj said. Her eyes welled up. “We are four siblings and all of us were in school back then. Our mother spent every penny she had on his treatment,” she told The Wire. Had the politicians vying for votes in the upcoming elections not stepped forward, she said, the family could not have afforded the funeral.

Bhardwaj’s father was cremated at Manikarnika ghat along with all his belongings — including his test report. “It is common practice in villages to burn the belongings of the deceased,” Bhardwaj said. “If you don’t, they ostracise your family.”

Unfortunately, complying with this unspoken diktat cost Bhardwaj and her siblings their due compensation.

Under the Uttar Pradesh Mukhyamantri Bal Seva Yojana (Covid), children under the age of 18 years who lost one or both their parents to COVID-19 are entitled to financial assistance of Rs 4,000 per month from the state government. Since Bhardwaj’s family burned her father’s test reports at the time of his cremation, they didn’t have the required documents to prove that he passed away from COVID-19.

Eventually, two among the four siblings received a cover of Rs 2,500 under the general category of the same policy. This applied to children whose parents had died for reasons other than COVID-19. A maximum of two children in a family can avail this scheme. Of the others, one was married, while the other did not get any aid.

Bhardwaj, an aspiring kho-kho player, said the amount was barely enough to feed her family. She looked at her mother. “We feel embarrassed to meet our relatives now because we have still not been able to repay their debts,” she said.

In the absence of her father, Bhardwaj felt like she had nobody to look to for guidance. She missed him. “There are days when I am confused about which is the right path to take, what I should choose for a better future, and there is nobody to fall back on,” she said. In moments like these, the fact that she didn’t have a keepsake, a photo even to remember him by, made the grief heavier still.

Deepak too wished for “a full family photo with my parents, brother, his wife and kids”. A day before Shiv Pratap died, he told his younger son to keep his temper in check. Deepak tried. But each time he remembered the pandemic, he seethed with feelings of betrayal and resentment.

The isolation of his family’s grief embittered Deepak. “When we took our father’s body back home, only a handful of people came to pay respects. Everyone was scared,” he recalled. His neighbour’s house had a window that faced his home. They kept it shut for two weeks because they were worried about contracting COVID-19. “Fear can make people do absurd things,” Deepak said. The memories of those three days — from his father’s hospitalisation to his cremation — were filled with trauma, pain and regret.

Occupational hazards

Deepak reached Harishchandra ghat with his father’s body at around 2 am on April 19, 2021. He was told he would have to wait for about 12 hours. The queue was even longer at Manikarnika ghat, less than two kilometres away. “I can never forget that horrific scene,” he recalled. “Every two minutes, a new body arrived at the ghat. There was no space for us to even stand.” In Hindu mythology, it is believed that those who are cremated at these ghats attain salvation.

According to Deepak, a cremation that would usually cost about Rs 5,000-Rs 6,000 was being pegged at Rs 18,000. Connections helped. Since his family had some acquaintances at the ghat, they were able to conclude the funeral rites within six hours, for Rs 12,0000.

Scenes from that night still haunted Deepak. “There was a woman with her toddler daughter trying to plead with the crematorium workers to reduce the costs,” he said. “It was just the two of them with her husband’s body, running from pillar to post…I could only imagine her loneliness.” He was incensed. “Has your humanity died, how can you exploit the helpless,” he recalled asking the workers at the crematorium.

But the workers Deepak was admonishing were braving extraordinarily difficult circumstances themselves. Nishu, one of the hundred crematorium workers at Harishchandra Ghat, offered a different perspective.“This was a time when even families were scared to touch their loved ones, their parents. We were putting our lives at risk to cremate their loved ones, why should we not earn from it?” he said. “Were we not scared of COVID? Do we not have families? We kept everything aside.”

Nishu did not reveal his name to me. He did not want people to know that he worked at the cremation ghat. He is from the Dom community, a Scheduled Caste that is deemed “untouchable” by dominant castes. Nishu’s ancestors worked in crematoriums, he had been coming to the ghat since he was a child.  In Varanasi, as in many other parts of the country, members of the community have been pigeon-holed into the profession across generations. The work is hazardous, the pay is irregular and meagre, and they often endure casteist discrimination.

Nishu pointed to a JCB vehicle that was being used to drill into the stairs of the Harischandra ghat. “They are building a new electric crematorium now. But during the second wave, the machines could cremate only two bodies in an hour,” he recalled. “We were cremating at least fifty bodies every hour.”

“We didn’t get a minute to eat, there were so many bodies,” Nishu said. “We would have 24-hour duty. Truck after truck carrying wood was getting over within hours.” A crematorium worker sitting with Nishu said that while they were able to charge a higher compensation than they would otherwise — sometimes getting about Rs 7,000-Rs 8,000 — “we would also gather money and cremate some unclaimed bodies”.

A few hundred kilometres away, in Prayagraj’s Sangam – the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati rivers – the shopkeeper Shyam Babu Yadav, who supplied provisions for funeral rituals, said that his business had grown four-fold during the second wave. “Everyone at Sangam, including boatmen, priests, rickshaw drivers, we were all earning more during the second wave from the customers who would come in bulk numbers for asthi visarjan of their loved ones,” he recalled.

The asthi visarjan is a ritual during which the bereaved family scatters the ashes of the person who has died into a river. During that period, Yadav was selling materials worth around Rs 20,000 every week. Now, he barely makes about Rs 5,000.

It’s all in the past

A sense of dread overcame Manish Mishra as he recalled the pandemic. “Everywhere there was the same news. You switch on the TV, there is COVID. My editor calls me for a story, it is about COVID. I come back home, and my mother is worrying about COVID.”

Journalism offered some respite. He began covering the pandemic as soon as the first case of COVID-19 surfaced in Prayagraj. “I reported on poor quality food being served in a hospital and the authorities had immediately taken action,” Mishra recalled. But as the second wave blazed through the region, merely reporting didn’t suffice. He started helping people waiting outside hospitals, coordinating access to beds, oxygen and doctors.

Mishra maintained a diary with all the contact details and information he had gathered from the stories he wrote during that time. He plans to write a book someday. When I met him, he had other things on his mind. Mishra was in a rush to finish the day’s story on candidates filing their nominations for the third phase of the ongoing Lok Sabha elections in Prayagraj.

“Is COVID an election issue this time?” I asked him.

He was bewildered. “It’s a forgotten story now.” The deaths and destruction, he said, were remnants of the past. “Most people are at peace with the way the government responded and managed COVID with vaccinations. Nobody is talking about it now,” Mishra said. The need to move on appeared to be at variance with the sobering reality of that time.

The health activist Nagvanshi said that there had been an improvement in the infrastructure of most government health centres in Varanasi after the pandemic. “Modern equipment, including oxygen concentrators at district level hospitals are now available,” she said. But some problems continued to be insurmountable. “The behavioural challenges of caste and class discrimination by the medical staff at these hospitals, poor diagnosis and hesitancy among people to visit a government health facility persist,” she told The Wire. In March this year, about 200 ASHA workers protested outside the office of the chief medical officer in Lucknow, asserting their right to regular salaries, insurance schemes and the status of state employees.

In the three years since the second wave, Narendra had been promoted; he was now District Project Coordinator in Rae Bareli. His colleagues and he received felicitations from the state government for their efforts during the second wave. The government did not extend any material compensation to them apart from their monthly salary of Rs 11,000. He didn’t mind.

But Narendra was worried about the recent news regarding the side-effects of Covishield, the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca’s vaccine. After all, he along with other volunteers had been at the forefront of encouraging people across villages to get vaccinated. He wondered if there would be any backlash against them.

“The news is doing the rounds in political circles but hasn’t reached the villages yet,” Narendra said. People in villages who had suffered during the pandemic were not discussing COVID-19 anymore. “They have to think about filling their stomachs before engaging in political blame games,” Narendra told The Wire. But he wasn’t sure of what would happen if the news did get traction. “There might be anger…They were anyway hesitant to take the vaccine.”

In an enactment of the law of unintended consequences, cremations and burials have been prohibited in Phaphamau ghat now, with an official notice and two government officials keeping a vigil on-site. After the pandemic waned, there were repeated instances of poor people leaving their dead surreptitiously near the ghat, which does not have adequate facilities for cremation.

Lallan doesn’t work as a diver any more. He had since found employment as a safai karamchari with the municipal corporation. The work is taxing and the monthly salary of Rs 9,000 is hardly enough to sustain his family of four. Lallan wishes the government would do more to facilitate opportunities for people from his community.

When we met, Lallan was gearing up to vote in the Lok Sabha elections. “We know from the conversations in the village which party will get the majority, and we vote according to that,” he said. “But no matter which party comes to power, it is not like the inequality between the rich and the poor will diminish.”

*The name has been changed for anonymity.

Asmita Nandy is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New Delhi.