It is NOT a cultural practice in either of these states to simply "dump the body" in the Ganges. The tradition is to scatter the ashes in the river. Wood burnig open air cremations along the river bank is the norm, which takes several hours to reduce a body to ashes & bone fragments. Under usual conditions, a family member would remain with the pyre till the end, and would collect the bone fragments, mostly the next day. A lot of the leftover material is wood ash, which would be deposited in the river directly by the crematorium workers. Historically when resources have been tight & crematoriums overwhelmed by epidemics in the past, a family member would not be present, and unscrupulous crematorium workers would overturn partly cremated bodies in the river to ensure fast turnover, which is what seems to have happened in 2020. Desperate families might also inter the bodies directly in the river.
Unless I misunderstood, someone I know from one of these 2 states recently told me their grandparent wanted to be disposed of like that. They said their generation or their parents don't believe in such practices.
According to the below article, some communities do practice dumping body in Ganges.
"He further informed that the practise of dead body being disposed in the rivers is prevalent in two particular stretches in central/eastern U.P. and the epicentre of which is in Kanpur Unnao region in central U.P and Banaras-Ghazipur area in eastern U.P"
Like I mentioned at the end of the initial comment, some families do indeed inter the bodies directly in the river, unable to afford the cost of cremation - this is also mentioned at the end of the wiki article you linked. This isn't new or surprising information. If there are communities that do this as a matter of routine, it's certainly not a significant source considering the 100s of millions who live along the river, where these community's dead mostly disappear without record into the river. For what its worth, it's certainly not a standard practice for the region. If bodies were present at significantly larger numbers in 2020, it suggests that either communities that do not traditionally practice interring in the river were doing it out of desperation, or that the traditional communities suffered significantly more deaths in the Delta wave, both of which are troubling concepts. The other possibility is that these were unclaimed bodies unceremoniously discarded by the civic administration, and the angle perhaps most appealing to those opposed to the current political dispensation.
EDIT: regarding the anecdote about a grandparent asking for this, there's a lot of context we don't know. Rather than a traditional practice, it might simply be a comment based out of frustration about the expense & bother to the family for a "standard" funeral. I also have family from the region and I've never heard of this as a standard routine widespread practice. For the most disadvantaged communities, I can understand it.
In this, Burka Dutt is interviewing a local pandit. He says he is not sure if these are all covid deaths. He gives 2 reasons for the increase in number of bodies:
1. fear of covid
2. increase in cremation costs due to increase in covid deaths.
So, those bodies are not necessarily all due to covid deaths.
The video shows a lot of bodies cremated on the river bank. Once the water level rises during rain, the pandit says they will all float into the river.
Also learned that some inter the bodies of infants and unmarried women directly into the river. This may explain the 2015 incident where they found more than 100 bodies, mostly of unmarried girls and children.
> He says he is not sure if these are all covid deaths
Yes, though he's speculating, as are we all. The reality is that bodies turned up in the river at an unprecedented rate just as the rest of the country was struggling with Delta. Bodies floating into the rising river is not something that only happened in 2020. Indeed, if rains are a known issue why cremate so close to the rising river? Pyres were so close to the river because there an unusually high number of them. Nobody would suggest that 100% of them were COVID deaths, but it seems likely a very high proportion of them probably were. Indeed, as the top level headline notes that excess deaths, regardless of the official cause of death is what we need to watch out for as a signal.
> Also learned that some inter the bodies of infants and unmarried women directly into the river
This is actually in line with the standard practice in other parts of the country, ie, burial, rather than cremation, for children and maidens.
> Regarding the grandparent comment, they are definitely not poor. They have a lot of money.
The point is that there is context to the comment we're not privy to. The elderly say many things out of frustration and as a commentary on their own families sometimes. For example, I had a relative remark several times that when he died he wanted to be 'thrown to the dogs', or in the trash. Does it imply that this was a traditional practice in the family? No, but it was a comment on the perceived indifference of his family. Are there communities that practice interring in the river as a traditional practice, and not simply as a cost saving measure, and your friend is from one such group? Perhaps, but if there are they are a vanishingly small group, otherwise the river would be choked with bodies on a regular basis. A body showing up once in a while would not be noteworthy. That so many did in a very short window in the summer of 2020 says that the traditional practitioners probably aren't the source.
Police officials of Unnao have offered an explanation that the bodies were
of "people who were dumped in the river or buried on the banks after their
families could not afford a proper cremation."
You are trying hard to give the story a spin that dead bodies in the river in such numbers is nothing notable.
Government contractors pressed into removing commemorative burial markers less they be counted by drones
I am not disputing that people were interring the bodies because they cannot afford cremation. But is that proof that all of them died of covid? In the last video you linked (Burka Dutt one), the pandit gives 2 reasons for more bodies on the river bed:
1. fear of covid
2. cremation charges went up due to covid, which in turn caused people to inter the bodies of non-covid deaths as well.
My point of replying to the original comment which used dead bodies in India's river as a sign of under counting was to question the idea of comparing the current situation to Spanish flu (which killed upto 17-18 million in India). What happened in UP/Bihar (news says up to 2000 bodies were found) is an isolated incident, specific to those states. Can that be used as an indication that the remaining 26 states are hiding, since these 2 are one of the most poorest states in India? I should be hearing news about discarded bodies from other states also right?
> Government contractors pressed into removing commemorative burial markers less they be counted by drones
Since you posted local YouTube channels, do you know how they handled the new dead bodies after the news about this incident broke out?
> But is that proof that all of them died of covid?
All was never even the hypotheses, that is a strawman argument. The hypotheses is that this incident, of thousands of bodies floating down the river and buried on the sand bars, is a striking, once in a century phenomena given the numbers. If this was normal we would have seen such numbers prior to covid.
The major reason, as you had noted as well, is the breakdown of the infrastructure for dealing with deaths by a state that is not competent enough to prevent them. Some state did far better than others. You had mentioned two, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Note that the population of UP + Bihar is the same order of magnitude as a middle sized European countries. One does not need other states to contribute if these two are badly hit.
