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 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…