In 2013, 110 found dead in Chennai bus terminal

Bus stations are meant to be transitory points but not usually for a final trip to the great beyond. And yet police have in the past year found the bodies of 110 people in the teeming Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus, through which 2 lakh people pass every day.

Most of the dead were elderly people, abandoned by their families, CMBT police inspector Sam Vincent said. Policemen take it on themselves to give those who are unidentifiable a decent burial, performing the funeral rites for more than 100 people in 2013.

Vincent, who maintains a record of elderly people rescued from the bus terminus and of those found dead, said policemen were forced to spend most of their time keeping track of bodies found in the terminus, attempting to identify the dead and contacting their relatives, or trying to trace the origins of elderly people abandoned by their families. "It's just part of the job," Vincent said. "It is our duty to make sure the dead are buried respectfully." With more than 800 long distance buses arriving or departing daily, police at the station often find it impossible to track down relatives of people abandoned or identify the dead.

In some instances, people are found dead on the platforms in the terminus. Bus crews also discover the bodies of people in their vehicles at the end of a trip.

Others who frequent CMBT, like autorickshaw driver Prabhu Kumaran, say they have seen people abandoning elderly relatives at the terminus. "They come by autorickshaw and vanish after leaving behind elderly people," Kumaran said. "Most of the senior citizens left behind are disabled in some way. They either cannot speak or hear; some cannot walk or take care of themselves."

He says he alerted the CMBT police about elderly people being abandoned at the terminus on three occasions in six months.

Inspector Vincent says the CMBT police have to deal with around 35 % of all the unidentified people found dead in the city. The 135 police stations in Chennai report four to five cases a month .At the CMBT police station, the number scan be as high as 12-14 each month.

"Police constable K Selvamani does a very tough job. He has disposed of most of the bodies found at CMBT," Anna Nagar deputy commissioner of police S Xavier Dhanraj said.

Selvamani , 36, a native of Chidambaram who lives with his family in Korattur, joined the force in 1999. "I was initially hesitant when I found a body in the terminus because I did not want to get involved. But giving abandoned people a proper burial now gives me peace of mind," he said.

"I am not a pious man," he said. "But I don't understand how people who go to temples to worship can dump elderly people or the bodies of the dead in a bus terminus."

Wednesday 08 January 2014

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