Hyderabad: Singed by public revulsion following the DC report on rotting bodies piled up at the mortuary Osmania Hospital auth-orities and the government swung into action to give them a funeral.
“There was no problem with dead bodies for the last two years as the civic body regularly disposed of them. However, due to more than a week’s gap at the end of April, bodies have piled up leading to this sorry situation,” Dr Taqiuddin Khan, head of department, forensics, said.
This does not explain why the bodies were kept in such a disgraceful condition, dumped in a corner, naked, and why the mortuary’s freezers were not functioning.
For its part, the GHMC blames some procedural glitches for the delay in disposing of the bodies. Dr Ganesh Babu, Chief Medical Officer, GHMC, who was at the OGH mortuary to oversee the process of removal, said that earlier this responsibility was with the Assistant Medical Officer of Circle-5 (South Zone), but after reorganisation of circles, it has now come under Circle-8 (Central Zone) and it took few days time for the new official to focus on this matter. He added that now the bodies will be collected every alternate day.
Dr Y Venkataramana, the new Assistant Medical Officer of Health (AMOH) said that nearly 40 bodies from the OGH mortuary were disposed of and the premises cleaned on Saturday. The bodies were sent to different graveyards in Panjagutta, Bansilalpet, Trimulgherry etc and the last rites of all were performed.
The hospital has to deal with 6,000 bodies every year. One-fifth of these are never identified and so no one claims them. Summer time is the worst as more homeless people succumb to the heat. Knowing this, surely hospital authorities and the GHMC can work in tandem to ensure that these bodies are treated with dignity and disposed off as soon as possible.
