‘Entire families’ wiped out by Covid carnage in rural India

After devastating India’s biggest cities, the latest Covid-19 wave is now ravaging rural areas across the world’s second-most populous country. And most villages have no way to fight the virus.

In Basi, about 1.5 hours from the national capital New Delhi, about three-quarters of the village’s 5,400 people are sick and more than 30 have died in the past three weeks. It has no healthcare facilities, no doctors and no oxygen canisters. And unlike India’s social media literate urban population, residents can’t appeal on Twitter to an army of strangers willing to help.

“Most deaths in the village have been caused because there was no oxygen available,” said Sanjeev Kumar, the newly elected head of the farmer community. “The sick are being rushed to the district headquarters and those extremely sick patients have to travel about four hours,” he said, adding that many don’t make it in time.

It’s a scenario playing out all over India. In interviews with representatives from more than 18 towns and villages in different parts of the country, officials outlined the scale of the carnage — from entire families wiped out to bloated bodies floating down the Ganga river to farmland left untended due to a lack of workers.

Many people said the scale of the crisis is much bigger than official numbers reveal, with villagers afraid to leave their homes even if they have fever and local authorities failing to properly record virus fatalities.

India reported a record 4,329 deaths in the 24 hours on Tuesday, while its total reported cases topped 25 million, according to figures from the Union health ministry.

Anger is building both at the Prime Minister Narendra Modiled central administration and local authorities for failing to bolster medical infrastructure following a virus wave last year, including securing sufficient supplies of oxygen and vaccines. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) last month lost panchayat elections in Basi and other parts of Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous state — just as the country started recording almost 400,000 new cases a day.

The sentiment on the ground suggests broader troubles for Modi and fellow BJP leader Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. The state holds assembly elections next year.

“We had complete support for Modi and Adityanath, but now whatever happens we will vote the BJP out,” Sahab Singh, 72, said in the centre of Basi, which