Hospital Staffs Break Dead Woman’s Bones For Easy Transport In Odisha; Probe Ordered

Bhubaneswar: The Odisha Human Rights Commission (OHRC) has started probing into the incident that some hospital workers at a community health centre in Balasore district broke the bones of a woman’s body and wrapped it in a sheet.

The Commission has issued a notice to the I.G. of Police, Railways, Cuttack as well as Collector, Balasore to cause an inquiry into the matter and furnish their report to the commission within four weeks.

The hospital worker stands over the dead body and breaks the bones to make it a compact bundle before slinging it on a bamboo pole due to unavailability of an ambulance at the health centre.

Quoting the media reports, the commission said an old woman while crossing a railway track after alighting from a train at Bahanaga railway station was suddenly knocked down by a goods train passing on the same track.

She was taken to a primary community centre at Soro in an ambulance, where she was declared dead. Although the railway police were well aware of the incident, two of their personnel reached the hospital after a long delay of 12 hours to take the dead body to Balasore.

Since rigor mortis had developed, those two police personnel to put the dead body inside a sack have broken its limbs by climbing over the body and finally carried it all the way from the hospital to Soro railway station on their shoulders by slinging it on a bamboo pole amid the full view of the public.

Such action of the railway police personnel was bitterly criticized by the people in general and the intelligentsia have opined that the entire episode smacks of heartlessness on the part of railway police personnel in dealing with the dead body.