Kanpur: The IIT Kanpur report on handling of the Covid -19, as The Wire reports, is deeply flawed in many ways, and it would be easy to dismiss it as mere political propaganda.
However, it deserves careful scrutiny given the wide media coverage and the eminence of its author.
Its most striking weakness is that it fails to ask, in any meaningful way, how many people died in Uttar Pradesh as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, writes Wire.
Apart from a passing reference to 'media reports on bodies floating in the Ganga', the report finds no space for the numerous ground reports on the state's devastating second wave - which described the overwhelmed crematoria, the panic, the confusion, the lack of medical care, the oxygen shortage, and many probable COVID-19 deaths that went unchecked and unrecorded, stresses Wire.
One particular group that the IIT report doesn't mention is Uttar Pradesh's school teachers.
According to the Uttar Pradesh Primary Teachers Association 2,046 teachers died in Uttar Pradesh following election duties during the massive second COVID-19 surge.
According to the state government, this number was three, divulges the Wire.
This mismatch is extreme but not entirely surprising. Several studies have now shown that India has been very hard hit in terms of mortality, with official data hugely underestimating epidemic deaths, bitterly underlines the Wire.
States comparable to Uttar Pradesh in terms of development, such as Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, stand out for having excess deaths more than 20-times higher than their official death tallies, discloses fact-checking news outlet the Wire.
The IIT report doesn't discuss any of this contextual information on mortality nor does it refer to any mortality studies.
Yet its author finds space for a remark about China: 'the reported deaths per million from China is a flat line almost on X-axis, thereby raising doubts about the sanctity of its data,' clears the Wire.
