People Deserve to Know Death Toll During COVID, HC Tells Bihar

The Patna High Court pulled up the Bihar government over its “opaque system” of maintaining birth and death records.

Patna High Court. (File Photo: IANS)

The Patna High Court pulled up Bihar over its “opaque system” of maintaining birth and death records.

The Patna High Court on Saturday, 19 June, admonished the Nitish Kumar-led Bihar government over its “opaque system” of maintaining birth and death records while stating that the state’s hesitance in doing so was not protected by the law, reported NDTV.

"As simple as it can be, the issue is whether more than 10 crore people of the state of Bihar have a right to know, on a digital platform, the number of deaths that occurred in Bihar during the time of COVID-19," the court said.

The high court also asked the state to update its digital portal within two months – the upkeep of which hasn’t been done since 2018 while urging elected representatives to reveal relevant data within 24 hours.

The court’s remark comes amid reports of allegations that the state massively undercounted COVID-19 deaths during the second wave.

The report, published by NDTV, indicated that nearly 75,000 people in the state had died of “unexplained causes” in the first five months of 2021 – a period when the second wave of COVID-19 wreaked havoc across the country’s fragile health infrastructure.

The Bihar government has officially maintained that about 7,717 people died of COVID.

The HC, however, reminded the Bihar government that since Right to Information is an integral part of Article 21, it is obliged to provide data on the portal relating to the number of deaths during the pandemic.