Many teachers pushed into India's polling duty died of Covid-19: Union

MATHURA (INDIA) • Ms Suman Lata's family begged her to refuse a summons to monitor elections in Uttar Pradesh state last month but, worried about losing her job, the 49-year-old mother of three went anyway, just as India's second coronavirus wave hit a peak.

Two weeks later, she was dead, one of more than 1,600 teachers who died from Covid-19 in the weeks after working at the polls, according to the families of eight victims and mortality data supplied by a teachers' union.

"She asked if she could be excused but the officers said, 'If you are not sick, you have to do your duty,'" said Ms Lata's 25-year-old son, Mr Vaibhav Agarwal, sitting in front of her photo, garlanded with flowers at the family's home in Mathura town, south-east of the capital New Delhi.

It was not possible to verify how many of the teachers from the eight families Reuters spoke to had contracted the virus when they attended election training or the polling.

Uttar Pradesh has for now considered compensation for teachers who died only while on polling duty. It says for those who died after polling, there is no proof they contracted the virus while on election duty.

The state's Basic Education Minister Satish Chandra Dwivedi told the media last week only three teachers died while on polling duty.

He dismissed the figure of 1,600 from the teachers' union as "misinformation".

Spokesmen for the state government did not respond to requests for comment.

Almost all the people interviewed said their relatives began developing symptoms several days after returning from duty.

Others said their relatives were already sick when they were called up but had not been tested for Covid-19. Their requests to be excused from their duty were refused, the families said.

Sprawling across northern India and home to more than 200 million people, Uttar Pradesh is more populous than Brazil.

Village-level elections are a huge exercise, with more than 1.3 million candidates vying for 800,000 seats in voting spread over four days last month.

With schools closed because of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of teachers were called in to help with monitoring voting and overseeing the counts.

Coronavirus cases spiked in the state last month, from official tallies of fewer than 1,000 a day at the end of March to more than 30,000 a day by end-April.

Hospitals in northern India saw an unprecedented crisis last month, with patients dying from a lack of oxygen and beds, while crematoriums worked around the clock.

The federal government led by Prime Minster Narendra Modi has been criticised for allowing mass gatherings throughout last month, including a religious festival attended by millions and elections in several states.

News footage of polls in Uttar Pradesh showed crowds of voters jostling in queues, some not wearing masks.

Uttar Pradesh did not go into a statewide shutdown until April 30, the day after Ms Lata finished polling duty.

The Uttar Pradeshiya Prathmik Shikshak Sangh teachers' union wrote several times to the state's Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a Modi ally, asking for the polls to be postponed but it said it received no response.

"These deaths could have been avoided if the elections were postponed but the government never paid heed," said Mr Sanjay Singh, the union's general secretary. "The least they can do now is give compensation to every family."

REUTERS