Local newspapers revealing coronavirus carnage in India
Meanwhile, the Divya Bhaskar newspaper in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat announced that 123,000 death certificates were released between March 1 and May 10.
Local language newspapers in India's small towns and villages are reporting that thousands of more people are likely dying from the coronavirus each day than the number which the government's data indicates.
The Dainik Bhaskar, a Hindi newspaper widely circulated in India, dispatched 30 of its reporters to the banks of the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh, reports Bloomberg.
What the reporters found is astonishing! About 2,000 corpses were found and photographed over a distance of 1,140 kilometres. At the time, the state government said that only about 300 people died every day.
The reporters claim officials are piling silt on more than 350 bodies in shallow graves in Kannauj; they see dogs gnawing at some of the 400 corpses only a short distance from a crematorium in Kanpur; and they count 52 corpses flowing down the river in Ghazipur, often crossing state boundaries.
"The Revered River probably wants us to share her grief," the report read. "That's why, the bodies that are sought to be hidden, our Holy Mother Ganga has unearthed."
Meanwhile, the Divya Bhaskar newspaper in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat announced that 123,000 death certificates were released between March 1 and May 10. This number is up 65,000 from the same time last year. However, the state reported only 4,218 Covid deaths.
According to the Gujarat Samachar, some 200 bodies are cremated daily in Vadodara, using 72 tons of wood, compared to an average of 60 corpses using 21.6 tons of wood before the pandemic.