More than 60 carcasses of cows have surfaced mysteriously in Sarayan River of Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district in the last 72 hours, leaving officials scratching their heads over the cause of the deaths.
On Wednesday, a day after a team of 35 State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) personnel fished out around 30 carcasses of cows and other cattle from the river in a seven-hour-long rescue operation, around half-a-dozen carcasses surfaced again. The UP government has now constituted a team to probe the matter and sought an explanation from block-level officers.
Residents of Sitapur’s Nahwaiya village, which is located on the banks of the river, were the first to spot the carcasses on Monday. “People were busy with their daily chores when some spotted the carcasses floating in the river. It was an unusual sight,” said village head Dinesh Yadav.
People said they rushed to the local police station to inform them about the carcasses and soon, the news spread like wildfire and hundreds of people from nearby villages thronged the site, causing chaos on the Naimish-Sidhauli road.
“We were born and brought up along the river but we haven’t witnessed any such site in the past. It’s gruesome. We wonder how such a huge number of carcasses made their way into the river. The matter should be investigated and the culprits should be punished,” said Kanhaiya Lal, another local who hails from Nahwaiya.
The district administration swung into action on receiving the information and launched a drive to fish out the carcasses. However, following poor light conditions and lack of manpower, the drive failed to take off on Monday. “On Tuesday, we re-launched the drive and pressed in four JCBs but they failed to reach the carcasses which were in the middle of the river. A team of SDRF was then roped in to carry out the rescue operation,” said Nitish Kumar Singh, additional district magistrate (ADM), Sitapur.
Officials said it took almost seven hours after which 35 personnel from the two teams of SDRF that were called in from Bareilly and Lucknow managed to complete the rescue operation. Officials said after carrying out the postmortem, the carcasses were buried along the banks of the river.
On the cause of death, the team of veterinarians who carried out the postmortem, too seemed clueless. “Since the skin and the organs were in a bad state due to excess decaying, it is difficult to ascertain the cause of death of the animals,” said a vet who was part of the team.
On the orders of Anuj Singh, district magistrate Sitapur, Chief Development Officer (CDO), Sitapur, Nidhi Bansal issued a notice to the block development officers (BDOs) of the two blocks and the assistant development officer (ADOs) and has sought explanation over the same.
The district administration has also formed a committee to investigate the issue.
Apart from the carcasses found in Sarayan, around 22 more carcasses of cows were found floating in river Gomti, which passes through the district, the same day. Another shocker came on Wednesday afternoon when at least half-a-dozen carcasses were found floating again in Sarayan.
This is not the first time that cattle carcasses have been found floating in UP’s rivers despite the government’s stringent measures to ensure protection of cows. In February 2022, around 37 carcasses of cows were found floating in the rivers Kali and Ganga in Kannauj.
In November 2023, the Uttar Pradesh government had ordered a cow census across the state in three categories, which included determining the number of destitute animals with cattle rearers, abandoned cows on the streets and Kanha Upvans. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also ordered the implementation of geo-tagging. At present, 11. 85 lakh cows are protected in 6,889 destitute cattle breeding sites, while over 1.85 lakh cows have been handed over to gau sevaks under ‘Mukhyamantri Sahbhagita Yojana’ for cow protection.
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