Chennai: The state government may perhaps give serious thought to the recent Madras high court suggestion to decongest morgues if it takes just one look at the number of unidentified bodies handled by its railway police alone.
The HC had advised the state to consider allowing private medical colleges to conduct autopsies to decongest morgues.
Nearly a third of the people dying on railway tracks in a year in the state go unidentified. Worse, the number of track deaths recorded by government railway police (GRP) in the last five years had recorded an annual 10 per cent rise.
On an average, about 2,500 people have died on railway tracks in the state and around 800 of them are unidentified bodies in the last five years, pointed out IG, GRP, Seema Agarwal who had taken an initiative to dispose them.
Ms Agarwal has formed a three-member team comprising a sub-inspector and two constables to help identify the bodies. The sole job of the teams stationed in all zonal headquarters, Coimbatore, Chennai, Madurai and Trichy is to collate information, particularly “man missing” complaints, obtained from the state crime records bureau (SCRB) and unidentified body cases.
The teams factor in the age, gender, appearance and date of disappearance and tentative date of death to identify the bodies.
“An exclusive software is available with SCRB. The teams have been trained to use and identify the bodies,” she explained claiming that 80 bodies have been identified and returned to the relatives since last February alone.
With only around 2,000 personnel (IG to constable) covering 44 stations and suffering paucity of funds to dispose bodies on its own, GRP is roping in voluntary groups to dispose the bodies, which ought to sent for autopsy within three days from the date of reporting as per law.
“We wait a few days after the autopsy for relatives to come and claim the body. If no one turns up, we have no other go but to rely on selfless volunteers and groups like Lions clubs and Rotary to dispose the bodies because we neither have funds nor morgues to preserve them,” a GRP inspector in Chennai division requesting anonymity said conceding that identification was a time consuming process, as in most cases, the person dies weeks after s/he goes missing.
