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Online system to track return of mortal remains of Indians

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External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and MoS V K Singh in New Delhi
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Minister of external affairs Sushma Swaraj, who is also minister for overseas Indian affairs, on Tuesday launched a website to facilitate the repatriation of bodies of Indians who die abroad.

Bringing the dead home from foreign shores has always been difficult and time consuming. There is sheaves of paperwork to sort through. Rules and regulations may not register. Also, you are far away from home. Everything is alien. The money is also running out...

So, will www.moia.gov.in, which can be accessed at the ministry of overseas Indian affairs (MOIA) portal, help cut through the bureaucratese, the red-tapism? The answer might be a 'yes', but it could also be a resounding 'no'. How the person died, and why the person lost his life could throw a spanner in the works.

For instance, on July 15 this year, a Malayalam filmmaker, who had made Dubai his home for the last five years, smothered his four-year-old daughter to death in his rented Dubai flat, and then slit his own and his wife's wrist. The "suicides" were discovered a couple of days later.

But it took a month for the filmmaker's brother, who flew in from Oman, to get the bodies released from the morgue. "There were many formalities to be completed. These were unnatural deaths and that made it difficult. Plus, the man had debts to pay, the reason why he chose to take the drastic step," said an expatriate journalist who works in the UAE.

Under normal circumstances, in cases of natural death, it takes a week to 10 days to bring a body home. But in cases of unnatural death, it might take weeks to negotiate through legalese and bureaucratese to secure the release of bodies.

In the first six months of 2014 there were 544 Indian deaths reported in Dubai alone, and 37 of them were suicides. From 2007 to 2013, there have been a total of 700 suicides. Road accidents also snatch away many Indian lives. Police cases and postmortems take time. The dead man's debts also have to be honoured.

Launching the website, Swaraj said it was an important step to help the Indian diaspora, especially those who work in emigration check required (ECR) countries such as UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Malaysia, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Thailand.

Swaraj said the website was launched after several representations from relatives of expatriate Indians who died abroad. She said with the portal it would be easier to keep track of the bodies' progress, and give a date to its arrival in India. File an online application to start the process. The file will be closed only after the body arrives home. In 2013, the bodies of nearly 4000 Indians were repatriated to India from ECR countries, half of them from Saudi Arabia.

Gone with the Wind
The bodies of some dead never return. The bodies of those who ended up on death row on murder and drug trafficking charges, many of them innocent victims of the drug mafia, deceived into becoming drug mules without even realising they were at great risk because they had agreed to carry a "packet of medicine" to someone in need in UAE, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

It's only on arrival, when their baggage is checked, and they are taken aside to an anteroom, that reality strikes. The penalty is death: Beheading in Saudi Arabia, the firing squad in UAE. Their passports are shredded and thrown to the winds. Consulates don't get a whiff of their coming, and their going...

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