Crematoriums under immense pressure as Covid dead pile up

At this rate, I will run out of space in three or four days, says gravedigger in New Delhi

Asummer storm is buffeting New Delhi as Mohammed Shamim wearily pauses to glance at yet another ambulance arriving with a coronavirus victim to bury, just minutes after the last.

The gravedigger’s grim workload, like those of others around India, has grown dramatically in the past few weeks in a brutal second wave that has caught authorities badly off guard.

When AFP visited the Jadid Qabristan Ahle cemetery in the Indian capital — which is now in a weeklong lockdown — on Friday, 11 bodies arrived within three hours.

By sunset, 20 bodies were in the ground. This compares to some days in December and January, when his earthmoving machine stayed idle and when many thought the pandemic was over.

“Now, it looks like the virus has legs,” Shamim, 38, a gravedigger like his father and grandfather, told AFP.

“At this rate, I will run out of space in three or four days.”

Around the graveyard, white body bags or coffins made out of cheap wood are carried around by people in blue or yellow protective suits and lowered into graves.

Small groups of men, some in Islamic skullcaps, look solemnly at the ground as the imam, struggling to be heard as dust laced with rain swirls around, recites final prayers. Sobbing women watch from their closed car windows next to the flashing lights of an ambulance as a yellow digger fills up the graves. “Two days ago someone came to me and said he needs to start preparing for his mother because doctors had given up on her,” Shamim said.

Horrifying images

“It’s unreal. I never thought I’d see the day where I’d have a request for starting the funeral formalities of a living person.”

Social media and newspaper reports have been flooded with horrifying images of row upon row of burning pyres and crematoriums unable to cope.

In Ghaziabad outside Delhi, television pictures showed bodies wrapped in shrouds lined up on biers on the pavement with weeping relatives waiting for their slot. In Gujarat, many crematoriums in Surat, Rajkot, Jamnagar and Ahmedabad are operating around the clock with three to four times more bodies than normal.

Above: Migrant workers gather at a bus station in Ghaziabad on the outskirts of New Delhi yesterday to board buses to return to their villages after Delhi government ordered a sixday lockdown.

Reuters/PTI/AFP Left: People crowd at a bus station in New Delhi to leave for their native places as India battles a recordbreaking spike in Covid-19 coronavirus infections that has forced the capital into a weeklong lockdown.