Aniket Kumar lost both his parents – who worked as principals in government-run schools – to COVID-19 within 10 days.
In early April, his father Lallan Ram, 59, and mother Meena Kumari, 55, attended a camp held in Uttar Pradesh’s Siddharthnagar district to train government staff for the panchayat (village council) elections in the state.
The large northern state, roughly the size of the United Kingdom, is India’s most populous with nearly 220 million residents.
Despite a ferocious second wave of the coronavirus engulfing the country, the mammoth village council elections were held in four phases in April in which nearly 1.3 million candidates aspired for 800,000 posts.