A Jharkhand town hired workers to handle Covid-19 bodies – and then forgot they existed

Before the pandemic, the young computer applications graduate had been in charge of a coaching centre in Jharkhand’s Bokaro district. Then Covid-19 hit India in March 2020 and the coaching centre shut down. He went on to volunteer with the local branch of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, Jharkhand. But the NGO also shut down. As his savings dried up, he grew desperate.

Then in April this year, as the second wave struck India, he heard of a new job. The work was grim but there were perks – Rs 15,000 a month and the promise of continued employment even after the second wave waned. The Chas municipality in Bokaro district was trying to form a “Covid Dead Body Management Team”.

Their job: to ferry the bodies of the people who had died of Covid-19 from the Sadar Hospital, the main government hospital in the town of Chas to the Shri Shamshan Kali Mandir Trust Crematorium, popularly known as Chas Shamshan Ghat.

For months, the eight members of the Covid Dead Body Management team worked round the clock. According to team members, they were not tested for Covid-19 and from April 27, when the team was formed, to July 27, when the second wave was already tapering out, only three of the eight workers were vaccinated. This despite the fact that they were among frontline workers most at risk of being infected and whose vaccination should have been prioritised according to the Union health ministry’s guidelines.

“The only reason I agreed was the money and job assurance,” said the computer applications graduate. This month, he was paid just Rs 6,736. Over the last six months later, he has only been paid about Rs 7,000-Rs 8,000, on average. He fears losing even this job, never mind continued employment after the pandemic.

It may as well have been a phantom team. They were given no identity cards and no formal papers as proof of employment. At work, they say, hospital guards called them “dead body team members” and banned them from the main entrance, claiming they would infect people at the hospital. As they sneaked in to do some of the most vital work at the hospital, the team members claim, they were denied basic dignities.

Mealtimes were particularly harrowing. The same guards who had ordered them away from the main entrance served them. “They would keep a distance from us while distributing the meal,” said the computer applications graduate. “We were treated like the untouchables. The guards told us not to touch them.”

Most of the team members come from marginalised communities: while four belong to Scheduled Castes, two others are Muslim.

Flood of fire

The Chas Shamshan Ghat is located under a bridge on the Garga river. In regular times, the crematorium has a workforce of 12, of which only two workers, Suresh and Ashish Dom, are tasked with carrying dead bodies in for funeral services.

When the deadly second wave hit India, bodies flooded the crematorium. The crematorium records alone tell a bleak story. In April and May this year, they show 1,202 deaths, out of which 302 were cremated according to Covid-19 guidelines. Last April and May, soon after the first wave hit India, the crematorium had recorded 243 deaths. In 2019, there were 214 deaths in the same period. In the third week of April this year, the crematorium ran out of firewood.

“We did not sleep for nights in the last week of April and the following two weeks of May because of the immense pressure,” said 55-year-old Suresh, who has worked at the crematorium for over 20 years. Other workers at the crematorium had to chip in. “Lighting a pyre is not my job, but I had to because there was no one else to do it,” said 55-year-old Ramesh, a sanitation worker.

The turning point came on April 17, when the crematorium had to handle 18 bodies and the existing contractual staff refused. “Workers who have been working for more than 15 years explicitly did not want to pick up the bodies of those who had died of the coronavirus,” said 31-year-old Vikash Ranjan, a city manager at the municipality.

Municipal workers then “unofficially advertised” the new jobs, Ranjan said. They spread word in their neighbourhoods that the municipality was promising “an incentive of Rs 15,000 per month and a job post-corona period to those who take the responsibility of handling the bodies of Covid victims,” explained Ranjan.

On April 26, 2021, five men who had lost their jobs in the pandemic arrived at Sadar Hospital. One of them dropped out immediately after the hospital guards told them what the work entailed. Finally, a team of eight was assembled on April 27.

In the early days, there were no fixed working hours. Eventually, the men were divided into two shifts: from 6 am to 2 pm, and then from 2 pm to 10 pm. But there were days when they received calls as early as 3 am.

They were hired to wrap bodies in black polythene bags, load them into an ambulance and take them to the crematorium. But then their duties expanded and they were enlisted in helping Suresh and Ashish Dom with the cremations. As family members of those who had died stayed away, they were often requested to assemble funeral pyres and cremate the bodies. Some bodies were never even claimed as no family members turned up.

It was on May 1, four days after they had been appointed, that the team members met their real managers for the first time: not the Chas municipality, as they had been given to believe, but a firm called Raider Security Services Private Limited, which provides security guards to organisations across Jharkhand.

Outsourced work

What the team had not been told was that on April 28, a day after they were appointed, the civil surgeon’s office asked Raider Security Services to manage the team. Ideally, the municipality should have started the whole process with a tender for a contract outsourcing the work. But there had been no time, officials said. Instead, once the team members had been found, they contacted Raider, which already did work with the municipality and Sadar Hospital.

According to official documents, the civil surgeon’s office reached out to Raider, asking them to manage 25 additional workers – including five people to handle the bodies of Covid-19 patients – for a period of three months, although this could be extended if the need arose.

When Findosh Khan, an officer at Raider, met the team for the first time on May 1, he realised there were three extra workers for the team to manage the bodies. Khan reasoned with himself that the company could take on the extra cost. “It doesn’t matter, we are together in this fight, so we will bear the loss. People must not die because of the lack of logistics,’’ he said.

Manoj Sharma, another officer at Raider, said the company was to pay workers their wages, and the administration would pay them later, along with a fee for the services provided. Sharma claimed they were supposed to pay the team members according to the Jharkhand government’s daily wages policy. For unskilled workers, the daily minimum wage is Rs 274.81. Over a period of 30 days, this comes to about Rs 8,244, much less than the Rs 15,000 initially promised by the municipality. The computer applications graduate claimed they were paid Rs 260 a day, even less than the minimum wage.

When they received their first pay cheque, the team members say, it was only for the amount of Rs 6,700. They raised the matter with one of the city managers. That is when they were told that the supervisor tasked with monitoring the team at the hospital had marked them absent on several days in the attendance sheet. Company policy dictated that they could only be paid for the days they were marked present. According to Raider, this came up to Rs 7,000-Rs 8,000 a month.

The meagre payment made to these workers came from Raider’s funds. Khan said that the administration was yet to pay Raider, six months after the team started work. According to Ramesh Mishra, the cashier at the civil surgeon’s office, the Jharkhand government had not provided the office with the required funds to pay Raiders. However, the administration rejected claims that the workers were underpaid.

What is more, since they do not exist on paper, the members of the team have few means to ensure they get their due. “There was so much pressure that official paperwork was not our first priority,” claimed Dr Uttam Kumar, the Covid ward nodal officer at the civil surgeon’s office.

Since the appointment of the workers was not documented at Sadar Hospital or the civil surgeon’s office, they would not even be eligible for insurance money under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Package. The scheme was launched on March 20, 2020, to provide extensive personal accident insurance to healthcare professionals as well as community and private healthcare workers who directly interacted with Covid patients. The scheme covers workers who have lost their lives to the coronavirus and accidental deaths while on Covid-related duty.

The three months stipulated in the contract have long run out and there is still no formal paperwork extending the period of employment. “There is the possibility of a third Covid wave, that is why I haven’t dropped the workers yet,” said Sharma.

No tests and late vaccines

When they started work in April, only three team members were vaccinated, they claim. It was only on July 27 that four others got the vaccine – the eighth member said he was unwell and so could not take it at the time. The four team members got provisional certificates a day later. According to them, the certificates bore an incorrect place and date of vaccination (July 28, instead of July 27).

Officials in the municipality claimed all team members were vaccinated when they started work but were unable to show documentary evidence of this.

Responding to questions, Rajesh Kumar Singh, who was Bokaro district commissioner at the time, said: “It’s impossible that they did not get vaccinated. If they did not get vaccinated, it might have happened due to personal reasons. They may have been scared or given the excuse of being unwell.”

Two vaccination centres were always open, he added, and those getting vaccinated did not need digital registration at the municipality office or at Sadar Hospital. Both centres, he insisted, “were accessible for them”.

The administration also claimed that the team members were tested regularly. It did not, however, provide any documentary proof of this.

The workers also claimed they had no place to rest or change in and out of personal protective equipment, even though they had asked the city managers. Team members said they cleared part of the hospital dumping room – used to store personal protective equipment, masks, spare televisions and other odds and ends – to rest there. They said they also brought their own soap to clean themselves after the cremations.

Dr Ashok Pathak, who was then the civil surgeon, denied these claims. “The auxiliary nurse midwifery training centre of the hospital was given for them to reside in and rest after their shifts, but the workers themselves chose not to stay,” he alleged.

The workers say the hospital authorities asked them not to speak of the internal functioning of the hospital and discouraged them from meeting reporters. By the end of May, when the fatality rate began to decline, the team members claim, they were pressed into doing other odd jobs, even if they protested.

‘No one to acknowledge our work’

After their shifts, all eight team members went back home and shared space with their family members – allegedly without being tested and some of them without being vaccinated. None of them told their families about the nature of their work at the hospital. But rumours spread.

One team member said some of his neighbours spotted him at the Chas crematorium and spread word in their locality that he was working as an undertaker. “People in my locality would clean every inch I walked and sat on,” said the team member, a 35-year-old who had sold clothes at a street stall before the pandemic and growing debts forced him to take up the work at the crematorium.

Almost all team members had lost their jobs when the pandemic struck – according to a survey by Azim Premji University, 100 million jobs were lost during the first lockdown, which started in March 2020. Most team members had worked in the informal sector. The pandemic forced them to move to even more precarious forms of work.

One team member had been an ice-cream vendor; another, a daily wage construction worker. A sanitation worker who had a job at a private hospital and worked on a contract basis at the SAIL plant in Bokaro said he would not have opted to join the team if he had not lost his jobs. Another 35-year-old member had been a housekeeper at a hostel for SAIL trainees. The hostel shut during the pandemic so he moved on to work at a private hospital before going to work at the crematorium.

While the second wave has waned, they are yet to go back to their old lives or find new jobs. Team members claim they are still paid less than half the salary they were promised, doing whatever odd jobs they are assigned at the hospital. “We were there to do this horrendous job when no one else came forward, and yet there is no one to acknowledge our work,” said the computer applications graduate.

*Names of the team members have been withheld to protect their identities.

Sarahana is a post graduate scholar in the field of Environment and Development at Ambedkar University Delhi.

This story has been reported under the National Foundation for India fellowship for Independent Journalists.