[valarauko]

Like I mentioned at the end of the initial comment, some families do indeed inter the bodies directly in the river, unable to afford the cost of cremation - this is also mentioned at the end of the wiki article you linked. This isn't new or surprising information. If there are communities that do this as a matter of routine, it's certainly not a significant source considering the 100s of millions who live along the river, where these community's dead mostly disappear without record into the river. For what its worth, it's certainly not a standard practice for the region. If bodies were present at significantly larger numbers in 2020, it suggests that either communities that do not traditionally practice interring in the river were doing it out of desperation, or that the traditional communities suffered significantly more deaths in the Delta wave, both of which are troubling concepts. The other possibility is that these were unclaimed bodies unceremoniously discarded by the civic administration, and the angle perhaps most appealing to those opposed to the current political dispensation.

EDIT: regarding the anecdote about a grandparent asking for this, there's a lot of context we don't know. Rather than a traditional practice, it might simply be a comment based out of frustration about the expense & bother to the family for a "standard" funeral. I also have family from the region and I've never heard of this as a standard routine widespread practice. For the most disadvantaged communities, I can understand it.

[nonamechicken]

Regarding the grandparent comment, they are definitely not poor. They have a lot of money.

One of the comments below linked to a couple of videos, one of which is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DWWeOt4jWM

In this, Burka Dutt is interviewing a local pandit. He says he is not sure if these are all covid deaths. He gives 2 reasons for the increase in number of bodies:

1. fear of covid

2. increase in cremation costs due to increase in covid deaths.

So, those bodies are not necessarily all due to covid deaths.

The video shows a lot of bodies cremated on the river bank. Once the water level rises during rain, the pandit says they will all float into the river.

Also learned that some inter the bodies of infants and unmarried women directly into the river. This may explain the 2015 incident where they found more than 100 bodies, mostly of unmarried girls and children.

[valarauko]

> He says he is not sure if these are all covid deaths

Yes, though he's speculating, as are we all. The reality is that bodies turned up in the river at an unprecedented rate just as the rest of the country was struggling with Delta. Bodies floating into the rising river is not something that only happened in 2020. Indeed, if rains are a known issue why cremate so close to the rising river? Pyres were so close to the river because there an unusually high number of them. Nobody would suggest that 100% of them were COVID deaths, but it seems likely a very high proportion of them probably were. Indeed, as the top level headline notes that excess deaths, regardless of the official cause of death is what we need to watch out for as a signal.

> Also learned that some inter the bodies of infants and unmarried women directly into the river

This is actually in line with the standard practice in other parts of the country, ie, burial, rather than cremation, for children and maidens.

> Regarding the grandparent comment, they are definitely not poor. They have a lot of money.

The point is that there is context to the comment we're not privy to. The elderly say many things out of frustration and as a commentary on their own families sometimes. For example, I had a relative remark several times that when he died he wanted to be 'thrown to the dogs', or in the trash. Does it imply that this was a traditional practice in the family? No, but it was a comment on the perceived indifference of his family. Are there communities that practice interring in the river as a traditional practice, and not simply as a cost saving measure, and your friend is from one such group? Perhaps, but if there are they are a vanishingly small group, otherwise the river would be choked with bodies on a regular basis. A body showing up once in a while would not be noteworthy. That so many did in a very short window in the summer of 2020 says that the traditional practitioners probably aren't the source.