PRAYAGRAJ: Police are reaching out to villagers in northern India asking them not to bury their loved ones in shallow sand graves on the banks of the Ganges River.

On Friday, rains exposed the cloth coverings of bodies buried in shallow sand graves on a wide, flat riverbank in Prayagraj, a city in Uttar Pradesh state.

While officials say the riverside burials have taken place for decades, the sheer numbers in the shadow of the pandemic are focusing more attention on the practice.

Vijay Kumar, a 30-year-old Buddhist, and his family gathered on Sunday to bury his 75-year-old mother who, he said, died of a heart condition.

He said his religion allows both cremation and burial, and he chose the latter.

A state government spokesman on Sunday denied local media reports that more than 1,000 corpses of COVID-19 victims were recovered from rivers in the past two weeks.

K.P. Singh, a senior police officer, said authorities had earmarked a cremation ground on the Prayagraj riverbank for those who died of COVID-19, and police were no longer allowing any burials on the riverfront.

"We have given instructions not to bury (the dead) there, either they bury them in their respective villages or in cremation grounds," he told The Associated Press.

On Saturday, an Associated Press photojournalist estimated there were at least 300 shallow riverside graves on a sand bar near near Prayagraj.

Each grave was covered by an orange, yellow or reddish cloth and appeared laid out in the same direction.

Health authorities last week retrieved 71 bodies that washed up on a Ganges River bank in neighboring Bihar state.

Authorities performed post mortems but said they could not confirm the cause of death due to decomposition.

India's two big states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with nearly 358 million people in total, are among the worst hit in the virus surge sweeping through the country with devastating death tolls.

Hapless villagers have been rushing the sick to nearby towns and cities for treatment, many of them dying on the way, victims of India's crumbling health care.

The Health Ministry on Sunday reported 311,170 confirmed cases in the past 24 hours, down from 326,098 on Saturday.

It also reported 4,077 additional deaths, taking the total fatalities to 270,284.

Both figures are almost certainly a vast undercount, experts say.