1,621 gov’t staff on poll duty die of COVID in India state: Union

Uttar Pradesh Primary Teachers Association says government workers were forced to work in polls amid a raging pandemic.

Aniket Kumar lost both his parents – who worked as principals in government-run schools – to COVID-19 within 10 days. In early April, his father Lallan Ram, 59, and mother Meena Kumari, 55, attended a camp held in Uttar Pradesh’s Siddharthnagar district to train government staff for the panchayat (village council) elections in the state. The large northern state, roughly the size of the United Kingdom, is India’s most populous with nearly 220 million residents.