Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday boasted of his “excellent corona management” while comparing the situation in his state with other countries and states, failing to mention the bodies floating in the Ganga or buried in the sand on its banks or those queued up outside cremation grounds during the peak of the second wave in April and May.
During the debate on the supplementary budget in the Assembly, the chief minister presented Covid-19 data of the UK and US as well as that of Maharashtra and Kerala to claim that his government had handled the pandemic well.
He said: “While the population of Uttar Pradesh is 24 crore, there were 17.80 lakh Covid-19 cases and 22,783 people have died of the disease. The recovery rate in the state is 98.6 per cent. About 1.31 lakh Covid deaths were reported in Britain, which has a population of 6.60 crore, while about 18,000 people died of the disease in Kerala, which has a population of 3.45 crore.”
The chief minister said he mentioned UK (also the US) because it was a developed country and Kerala because it had a high literacy rate.
Senior Congress leader Dwijendra Tripathi said: “While the chief minister presented correct data of the countries of the world and states in India, he presented fake data about UP. There is not a single family in the state which has not lost a member to Covid-19. At least 100 bodies were brought every day to each cremation ground in the cities (75 cities). There is more than one cremation ground in each city. Starting from April 5, this influx of the dead continued till May 15. Adityanath should count this number in the cities, assuming that we will never be able to calculate the deaths in the rural areas of the state.”
“The chief minister also didn’t mention the oxygen crisis, which had played a major role in deaths as a majority of the hospitals didn’t get enough of the life-saving gas to save the patients. The government took legal action against the hospitals instead of supplying oxygen to them,” he added.
Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, Ram Govind Chaudhary of the Samajwadi Party, said: “The state government boasts of its works on the basis of fake data. The BJP is known for doing so from the Centre to UP.”
“The government didn’t want to save lives and didn’t feel the pain of 24 crore people of the state. These people are waiting eagerly to throw the BJP out of power in 2022,” he added.
