Delhi's Graveyards Run Out Of Burial Space As Covid-19 Fatalities Spike In City

The largest Muslim graveyard in the national capital near located near ITO is running out of burial space amid rising Covid-19 deaths with coronavirus victims from other NCR areas also being buried there, an official said on Tuesday.

"There should be some arrangement so that Covid-19 victims are buried at graveyards in their neighbourhoods and their relatives do not have to come here because space is limited," Haji Mian Faiyazuddin, secretary of Qabristan Ahle Islam graveyard said.

The graveyard’s management committee will write to the Delhi government requesting help to ensure that bodies of Covid-19 victims from other parts of the city are not brought here, Faiyazuddin said.

Faiyazuddin further said that one of major problems being faced by the graveyard management is that they also have to provide space for burial of Covid-19 patients from neighbouring cities like Noida, Ghaziabad and Meerut who die while undergoing treatment in Delhi. "We do not have any problem to bury Covid-19 victims, but space is a real issue," he added. If burials continue at the current rate, we will start facing difficulty to even accommodate normal burials within the next two months, Faiyazuddin said.

"We receive around 4-5 bodies of Covid-19 victims these days. A total of 67 Covid-19 victims were buried here in September, 57 in October and in November so far 50 bodies have been buried," Faiyazuddin said.

Staring at a space crunch, the graveyard management last month had readied 5-6 acres of extra space for burials of casualties caused by the virus. The Covid-19 burials at the ITO graveyard, measuring about 50 acres, started in April.

Delhi reported 121 deaths due to Covid-19 on Monday. On Sunday, 121 fatalities pushed the death toll to 8,391, authorities said.