Morgue in a shambles leaves dead without dignity

“It is just impossible to work here. The stench from the cold-room is unbearable. There isn’t proper seating arrangement even for the doctors,” says a doctor on duty, even as stench hits you hard on the face, forcing all those present in the room to cover their face with handkerchief.

But bad smell is not the only problem here. The department does not have modern equipment to carry out post-mortem. For instance, electric saw required to cut through the skull or the chest is not there. So, skulls are cracked using hammer, an antediluvian method looking at the modern techniques forensic science uses these days.

Says a doctor, “Ideally, skulls have to be cut using an electric saw. Using a hammer will obviously damage the brain parts, often making it difficult to ascertain the cause of death.”

Besides, the relatives whose kin’s bodies are lying at the morgue are forced to find ad hoc ways to preserve the bodies from decay. A doctor, who has duty at the post-mortem department, said the relatives of the dead brought here have to get ice blocks to preserve the body till they are given permission to take it away.

Another issue is alleged delay on the part of police to complete procedure so that unclaimed dead bodies can be disposed of at the end of seven days (The law says an unidentified body has to be kept for seven days before disposing of it). A male nurse at the morgue said that policemen did not complete the required procedure in time with the result that dead bodies lie beyond seven days. The employee pointed out that at least five of the 15 unidentified dead bodies lying in the cold-room had passed the seven-day deadline.

Admitting that all is not well with the post-mortem department, the hospital superintendent Dr M M Prabhakar, however, said that a Rs 35-lakh proposal to modernise the department had been finalised. “The entire section will be air-conditioned with cubicles for keeping the dead bodies,” he said.

Prabhakar said that the fund would be released soon after this year’s budget of the health department was announced. According to him, work on modernising the department would begin in two to three months.

Prabhakar also admitted that presently the department does not have an electric saw. But under the proposed modernisation plan, the department would get special equipment, including electric saw for cutting skull and chest, he said. However, he maintained that it was not true that the air-conditioners in the two cold-rooms were mostly out or order. “The air-conditioners are working, but not to the fullest capacity,” he said. According to sources, in the hospital, the air-conditioning is being looked after by the Public Works Department (PWD), which does not maintain it properly.

Also, a doctor at the department pointed out that bottles containing viscera of the dead bodies have been lying on the shelves for years now.

“In medico-legal cases, viscera of the bodies are put in a bottle. The police should take away the bottles to the forensic laboratory as soon as possible, but some bottles are lying in our building for the last 10-15 years,” he said. The result is bottles are bubbling with worms, making the place seem even more hellish.