BHUBANESWAR: Notwithstanding awareness campaigns, myths surrounding the AIDS continue to haunt remote pockets of Odisha, which ranks 14th in the country in terms of the number of HIV-infected patients.
In a bizarre incident, people in a nondescript village in Balasore district allegedly prevented cremation of the body of a 35-year-old dalit man in the cremation ground as he was suffering from AIDS, police said on Saturday.
His family members had to perform the cremation in their personal land in front of the house as the intervention of local administration and police too failed to dissuade the villagers from their stand. The family has two more HIV positive patients including the man’s wife and younger daughter. Sources said the man, a resident of Tentei village under Soro police limits, died of AIDS while undergoing treatment in SCB Medical College and Hospital at Cuttack on Friday. His family members brought the body to his native place for cremation.
When the news spread in the locality, villagers gathered at the cremation ground and prevented the bereaved family from performing the funeral. They insisted them to take the body to far away river bank for cremation.
As the villagers remained unmoved despite several appeals, the relatives of the deceased informed the police and local tehsildar to intervene. Though a police official and local revenue inspector (RI) reached there and tried to pacify the villagers, they did not budge. Finally, the family members had to lit the funeral pyre in front of their house.
The man’s mother alleged that the villagers opposed the cremation as they feared the disease may spread since they use the road that divides the cremation ground.
A villager Bimbadhar Mallik said school children use the road every day which is why they insisted on funeral at the river bank. Soro Additional Tehsildar Satrughna Sethi, who visited the village on Saturday, said the villagers were reluctant to allow the family to perform the last rites as cremation had been stopped in that ground since 2013 following a dispute.
The village having a population of 1,000 is mostly inhabited by dalits. The man had contracted the disease when he was working in a private firm in Mumbai.