The Panchayat election in Uttar Pradesh has started taking a huge toll with reports claiming that thousands of cases of corona virus are coming daily from the rural areas of the state.
According to an NDTV report, at least six persons have lost their lives in a single village of Meerut district in the last one week alone. They were all corona positive.
Though the rural areas in general lack testing facility yet 21 out of 40 patients were tested positive in this village after an arrangement was made recently in this regard. The situation is grim throughout the state.
Till recently, the pandemic in India was confined to urban areas and middle-class pockets. But the steep rise in cases in rural areas is being attributed to Maha Kumbh Mela and Assembly and Panchayat polls.
The report quoting local people said that no medicine whatsoever has been arranged by the government and there is no facility to take the patient to hospital. At present these patients are quarantined at their respective homes. This is the condition in a district which is just 70 km from Delhi. It is here that the media recently reported at least five deaths due to shortage of oxygen in a hospital.
The general complaint among those engaged in election and counting works is that no Supreme Court guidelines on counting were followed by the State Election Commission.
There was appeal from various quarters to postpone the rural bodies’ election but nobody paid any heed to it.
Politically too, the election results proved dear to the ruling BJP which was routed in most of the districts.
Various teachers’ association had already alleged that hundreds of teachers engaged in polling-related work had died due to corona virus in the last few weeks. They directly blamed the Yogi Adityanath government for so many deaths.
In the last 24 hours Uttar Pradesh officially reported 350 deaths due to COVID-19—the unofficial toll may be much higher. Thus, the state is only second to Maharashtra.
So far 4.14 lakh positive cases have been reported in India in the last 24 hours and 3,915 people lost their lives.
