Nobody’s body in Mumbai

One September day a couple of years ago, Pramod Patil*, a 36-year-old Government Railway Police (GRP) official got a phone call that led him into a nightmare he’d never forget.

“A commuter crossing the railway tracks was run over by a local train neat Vidyavihar. A woman who was in a train on an adjacent track saw the accident and called us,” he recalls.

“She was hysterical. I was on duty at that time, and I rushed to the spot. Even today I break into a sweat when I think of what I saw. The head had been severed from the body — it was a clean cut — and was nowhere to be seen. One of my colleagues discovered it later lying several feet away, badly disfigured,” says Patil, who ended up spending the next 24 hours with the headless corpse, as he tried to get it identified.

“Tracing the family of an unclaimed body is a very difficult task. Normally, we at least have the advantage of being able to take a photograph of the body, which we then use to cross check with the missing persons’ register. But with an unclaimed, headless body, with no documents to identify it, there was nothing I could do, other than wait for the post mortem report,” he says. Needless to say, nobody came forward to claim the headless corpse, which eventually had to be cremated by Patil himself.

Ambulance driver Kali Singh had a similarly morbid experience. Sometimes the police control room receives calls about ‘a bad smell’ — a sure indicator of an unclaimed body that has been decomposing for a while. “Once, the body was so decomposed that we just could not eradicate the stench from the vehicle. No amount of air freshener helped,” said Singh.

And the most common issue is that of ‘over-burdened’ morgues turning away cops saddled with an unclaimed body. On September 19, Thane railway police officials spent the entire night hauling the body of a 51-year-old railway accident victim from one municipal hospital to another in search of a morgue. But they were turned away by the Thane Civil Hospital, the Sion Hospital and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Hospital, Kalwa because their morgues were full. The cops had to wait for 24 hours before arrangements could be made for the body.

Additional work
“Every local police station at some time or the other has to contend with an unclaimed body,” says Ramesh Jadhav, a police constable from Powai police station. “There have been too many times when I have just finished a 24-hour shift, and am about to leave for home, and I get a call about a dead body. This means another 12 to 24 hours of work,” Jadhav says.

Finding a body does translate into additional work for the cop as it involves conducting an immediate preliminary enquiry, taking down the details of the body, and arranging to transfer the body to the nearest post mortem centre. And it doesn’t end there. “From the time an unclaimed body is spotted till the time it is either handed over to the concerned relatives or cremated or buried, it is our responsibility,” says Jadhav.

Though statistics on the number of unclaimed bodies are not separately tabulated, police sources estimate that at least five to seven cases of unclaimed bodies are registered in police stations across Mumbai every week. These are usually drug addicts, slum dwellers, destitute women, the elderly who have been abandoned by their families and were living on the street, or accident victims.

“The bodies of such people are intact, unless they are decomposing. But it is finding the bodies of railway accident victims that we really dread, as they are in terrible condition,” says an official from government railway police (GRP). The problem is further compounded by the fact that even basic emergency facilities are unavailable at railway stations on the Central and Western lines.

Last year, a survey carried out by the GRP revealed that most stations had no first aid box, no ambulance, no doctor available on call, no accident hamals (labourers), and no stretchers. This is despite the fact that over 5,000 people die annually while crossing railway tracks, as per the Western and Central railways’ own records.

The police procedure
The lengthy procedure begins immediately after a patrolling police van spots a body or a local police station receives a phone call informing them about it. A police team is rushed to the spot. A document detailing the body’s physical attributes, such as colour of the eyes, complexion, age, birth marks, height and weight is prepared.

Officials also take a fingerprint for records and run a check on it with the finger print bureau to confirm if the person has a criminal background. After a detailed report is prepared, a photographer is called in to click pictures of the unclaimed body.

The body is then sent to a hospital to be kept in the mortuary. A copy of the photograph and the detailed description is sent to all the city police stations. One copy also goes to the missing persons bureau. An intra-state and inter-state wireless alert with the details of the unclaimed body is also sent out. The police then wait, usually for seven to 15 days, for concerned relatives or anyone at all to come forward, identify, and claim the body.

Pay from own pocket
Apart from the additional work, disposing of a body is also an expensive proposition for the cops, since it involves shelling out money from their own pockets. “It takes Rs500-600 to dispose of a body,” says a police official from Samata Nagar police station, Kandivili.

“The BMC runs five electric crematoria, one each in Shivaji Park, Sion, Chandanwadi, Oshiwara and Chembur and charges a subsidised rate of Rs250 per adult body and Rs125 per child. “Unclaimed bodies are cremated free-of-cost,” says Dr SN Mohite, forensic doctor, Nair Hospital.

Yet there are incidental expenses that the cop ends up bearing. “We have to purchase the shroud, bear the ambulance charges to transport the body from the place where it was found to the nearest morgue or post mortem centre, pay for photographing the body, and pay for transporting it to the crematorium or burial ground,” says a cop.

“The most difficult thing is to find someone willing to help carry the body. Often the bodies are in such a mangled and decomposed state and smelling so bad that even labourers refuse to go near it. In such situations, we find that only drug addicts are willing to do the job, for a sum of Rs100 or 200,” adds the official. “The bodies are kept in the morgue for a week to 15 days. Sometimes, when we find out the person’s name but not the address, we keep the body for up to a month hoping someone will claim them.”

Hospital authorities end up sending several reminders to the police officials about disposal of the body. Sometimes, if the police gives a no-objection certificate, the cadaver is donated, for research purposes, to hospitals which have a medical college affiliated to them. But this is not a regular occurrence, which is why the city’s morgues, at any given point of time, are overburdened with unclaimed bodies.

“Morgues in both Thane and Mumbai have four to five times their capacity of bodies,” points out Dr Rajesh Dere, forensic doctor at Sion Hospital. The problem becomes even more acute during times of disasters like the July 11, 2006 train blasts or the 26/11 terror attack.

There have been several reports of the deplorable condition of morgues in the city. Some of the bodies, with number tags tied to the big toe, waiting to be claimed, are maggot-infested, and even pose a health hazard to the morgue attendants. Rats are a common sight at morgues, usually located on the ground floor of hospitals.

“There have been times when we have had to approach the commissioner of police to get the local police stations to attend to the bodies,” says a forensic doctor at Rajawadi Hospital. “It is the police’s job. An unclaimed body can only be cremated or buried in the presence of a police official, after the police station has given a no-objection certificate.”

Former police commissioner AN Roy had sometime ago issued a circular declaring that police officials should be reimbursed a sum of Rs600 for the disposing of a body. However, several police officials complain that this circular has not been put into effect.

“We have put in claims and produced all the bills, but we are yet to see the reimbursement. Most of the time, we pool in money to arrange for the funeral of unclaimed bodies,” says a police official.

“We try to give the body as decent a funeral as possible. We try to distinguish the religion by looking at obvious identification marks, tattoos, etc. For instance, in the case of a male, we check if the body is circumcised, and also look for tattoos of a cross on the palm, to determine the religion. And accordingly, we perform the last rites and rituals,” says a cop, adding, “after all everyone deserves a decent funeral.”
(Names of some of the policemen have been changed on request)