New Delhi’s funeral pyres burn as Modi begins to lift lockdown

INDIA reported a record 9,887 new virus cases in one day yesterday, overtaking Italy as the world’s sixth-biggest outbreak, two days before its lockdown is relaxed with the reopening of malls, restaurants and places of worship.

With more than 236,000 total cases, India now has fewer infections than only the US, Brazil, Russia, Britain and Spain, according to a Reuters tally.

However, India’s 6,642 death toll is small compared with those countries.

Nevertheless, the mounting death toll in New Delhi has meant that traditional funeral pyres have been drafted in to burn the bodies of coronavirus victims in the Indian capital as crematorium furnaces struggle to keep up.

Smoke from the open-air fires stings the eyes of waiting mourners and workers at Nigambodh Ghat, New Delhi’s biggest and oldest crematorium, where funerals run from 8am to late into the night.

Authorities have ordered victims be incinerated in modern furnaces as a precaution against infection.

But only three of six furnaces at Nigambodh Ghat are working, so for the past week, wood pyres, the traditional structures used in Hindu funeral rituals for thousands of years, have been allowed to help clear the backlog.

Suman Kumar Gupta, of the crematorium management committee, said families had to queue to pass through a “sanitation tunnel” and then wait hours for the ceremony, prompting anxiety about the risk of infection. “They want it to be faster, but we have only the three furnaces working,” he said.

Some ambulances bring four or five bodies at a time from hospitals where mortuaries are reportedly overloaded. At the furnaces, mourners stand behind screens, their masked faces revealing eyes brimming with tears.

Narendra Vashisht, 68, waited two hours before he could peer through the glass at his brother’s body being prepared for its final moments.

“It has not been easy,” he said. “We had to keep asking them to hurry it up.”

The government of Narendra Modi, the prime minister, anxious to jumpstart a crippled economy, is easing the lockdown imposed in March, which the government says helped avoid an exponential rise in cases. Restrictions will be loosened from Monday but some experts fear it is too soon.

Giridhar R Babu, an epidemiologist at the Public Health Foundation of India, wrote on Twitter: “We can survive and sustain the gains without ... opening up religious places for some time.”

The World Health Organisation said late on Friday that India’s lockdown had helped it dampen down transmission of the virus, but there was a risk cases could rise again.