Plea In Supreme Court Seeks Special Team To Probe Case Of Bodies In Ganga

The petition filed by two lawyers sought direction to constitute an SIT directing the respondent authorities to conduct postmortems of the dead bodies which were found floating in the river Ganga.

A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed in the Supreme Court on Thursday sought direction for setting up a Special Investigating Agency to supervise the probe into around 100 corpses found floating in the river Ganga in Bihar's Buxar and Uttar Pradesh's Unnao and Ghazipur districts. The petition filed by two lawyers -- Pradeep Yadav and Vishal Thakre -- sought direction to constitute an SIT directing the respondent authorities to conduct postmortems of the dead bodies which were found floating in the river Ganga in Buxar, Ghazipur and Unnao districts respectively. The petitioner-cum-lawyer duo of Yadav and Thakre said that the recovery of these decomposed corpses from the river Ganga raises serious concern as the river water is the freshwater source for many people in the areas and if the bodies were infected by COVID 19, then it might spread among the villages in both the states because of contaminated water. "The states till now have not taken any single effective step towards the purification of water, which has become contaminated due to these decomposed corpses floating in it and both the states are not fulfilling their responsibility of providing clean water to their natives and thus, violated Article 21 of the Constitution of India," the petition said.