In a testament to the apathy towards rural India, two men were forced to carry a corpse for 10 kilometres in a makeshift cradle, after the ambulance stopped due to poor road conditions. The incident occurred in Andhra Pradesh’s Koyyuru mandal located in the district of Visakhapatnam.
53-year-old Marudi Sarveshwar Rao was admitted to Visakhapatnam’s King George Hospital on Wednesday. He had been referred to the hospital by staff at the Public Health Centre in Chintapally. On Thursday, he succumbed to his illness after which the Tribal Cell wing of the hospital arranged for an ambulance to take his body home.
In a truly disheartening video, we can see two men carrying his body in a makeshift cradle made up of a blanket and a wooden rod. The men allegedly carried the body for 10 kilometres.
While some of the roads were supposedly under construction, others had been worked on and abandoned prior to completion. As a result of this, no vehicles were able to pass through the road to more interior parts of the mandal.
Earlier in 2018, a similar instance occurred when a pregnant woman from a place near Vizianagaram was forced to give birth on the road as she was unable to reach Salur Hospital on time due to poor road connectivity. A medical team from the hospital was sent to the area, but the woman had delivered a baby girl before they could reach her.
In a video, one of the relatives of the woman could be heard saying, “You also please see our problem. This is the situation we are in and this is how things are. No one cares for us and even at the time of death, we don't know where to go and whom to approach. Please see this video and do something to help us. Hope it'll help you in understanding our problem. We are sharing this video of us carrying a pregnant woman and we hope that you can see this. We humbly appeal on behalf of these families.”