Lucknow, May 11: Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Ajay Kumar Lallu on Tuesday trashed the state government's claims on managing the coronavirus pandemic and accused Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath of fudging statistics. Accusing the BJP government of laxity, the opposition leader said a “tower of corpses” has risen in the state.

Lallu's statement came hours after Defence Minister Rajnath Singh's visit to Lucknow, where he praised Adityanath's handling of the COVID-19 crisis and claimed that the World Health Organisation too had done so. UP CM Yogi Adityanath Sets Up 700 Help Desks, 51 Oximeters And 341 Thermal Scanners Provided For Protection of Cows From COVID-19.

“Can't the defence minister, who is praising the chief minister indulging in fudging the statistics, see the flames from the funeral pyres in his parliamentary constituency of Lucknow and other parts of the state?” the Congress leader said.

“Can he not see the deaths caused by the shortage of oxygen and the shortage of medicines?” he said, adding that Singh showed a lack of sensitivity by praising the chief minister. Lallu claimed that the ground reality is that there are “no vaccines, no oxygen, no medicines” in the state.

"Due to the laxity of the government, there is a ‘minar' (tower) of corpses, and it is getting praise,” he said. He accused the state government of being “shameless” and “disgracing humanity”.

Earlier, Rajnath Singh had claimed that the World Health Organization has praised the Uttar Pradesh government's work. “It is not a small thing," he said.

In a tweet on Monday, the WHO said, "In #India''s most populous state Uttar Pradesh, the state gov. has initiated house-to-house active case finding of #COVID19 in rural areas to contain transmission by testing people with symptoms for rapid isolation, disease management & contact tracing."

The WHO has been working with the state government in these activities, the organisation's tweets indicate.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)