MUMBA — Pity the undertakers – burying and burning all day long, chanting deep into the night yet never keeping pace with the corpses of India’s COVID-19 crisis.
And all for what?
“For every one body that I perform last rites for, there are a dozen more waiting. There is no social distancing, no sanitizers. It is a critical situation here,” crematorium worker Ram Karan Mishra, 30, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The measly pay – up to 400 rupees ($5.43) a day – offers scant recompense for the risks and round-the-clock shifts that come with end-of-life rituals in a pandemic.
All tasks breed exhaustion; many threaten infection.
Now an innovative crowdfunding initi…
Keep on reading: India crowd-funds millions for its weary crematorium workers