Never saw such rush of bodies before, say Panipat volunteers
ORGANISATION CLAIMS TO HAVE CREMATED OVER 600 BODIES SINCE THE PANDEMIC GRIPPED THE COUNTRY
KARNAL: Five volunteers from Panipat district have been working tirelessly to arrange a dignified cremation to Covid-19 victims, claiming to have dealt with over 600 bodies since the pandemic gripped the country last year, 450 of them in Aprilmay this year alone.
The organisation — Jan Sewa Dal (JSD) — has been cremating unclaimed bodies for 10 years, but only five members stood up to the occasion when it came to Covid victims.
The members who are doing this volunteer service have their private businesses and are in the age group of 40 to 60 years.
JSD member Chaman Lal Gulati says they attend to all bodies irrespective of their religion. “We arranged burial for six Muslims even,” he said.
“We have been cremating unclaimed bodies for the past ten years, but I never saw such a large number of deaths as we even cremated 35 bodies in a day,” said another member Kapil Malhotra. At the peak of the pandemic earlier this they were cremating bodies round the clock, having their food in the cremation ground itself, he added.
“Kin of most of the victims didn’t even stay to witness the cremation, and nobody came to collect the ashes of 35 victims. We had to take them to Haridwar for immersion,” said Gulati.they said since March last year, they have spent most of the time with the Covid victims but not even a single member of the team got infected. Each member of the team gets himself tested for Covid every fourth day.
According to them, the second wave is now receding and the number of daily Covid deaths has come down to fourfive from 15-20 earlier. The JSD has hundreds of regular donors and it also provide free ambumonth lance service, free food and medical assistance to the poor Covid patients.
However, there is big difference in number of deaths claimed by the district health authorities and the number of bodies cremated by the JSD. The state health department records only 406 Covid victims in Panipat district.
The officials said that several patients from NCR districts especially from Delhi also died in different hospitals.
Panipat chief medical officer Dr Jitender Kadyan said, “In our record, we have reported the deaths of people, who belonged to the district and they (JSD) might have also cremated bodies of people who do not belong to Panipat.”
Panipat’s nodal officer for Covid Ravinder Malik also gave the same explanation. Panipat deputy commissioner Dharmender Singh did not respond to the phone calls and text messages sent to him for his comment.