**Soro (Balasore)**: The Odisha Human Rights Commission (OHRC) lodged a complaint and sought explanation from the Government Railway Police (GRP) and Balasore district authorities after a hospital staff was seen breaking a dead woman’s body at the hip and carried it in a sling because of the lack of an ambulance in the area.
The woman, a 76-year-old, was killed after being run over by a goods train near the Soro railway station in the district.
The incident came to the limelight when the State Government has been drawing flak from various quarters after a tribal man had walked 10 kms carrying his wife’s body on shoulders at Bhawanipatna in Kalahandi.
In the Soro incident, two hospital employees are seen stuffing the broken body into a large plastic bag and slinging it on a bamboo stick before carrying it all along the road.
There are no post-mortem facilities in Soro, so she had to be taken to a hospital in the district headquarters, 30 km away.
No ambulance was available – which has been exposed as a chronic problem in these districts that are among India’s poorest – so the railway police decided that the body would be sent by train. When hiring an auto-rickshaw looked expensive, the police allegedly asked a sweeper to make arrangements for ferrying the body to the station. By then, the woman’s body had become stiff.
Apparently to make it easier to carry the body, workers broke its bones at the hip, trussed it up and strung it to a bamboo pole before walking 2 km to the railway station.
“They carried my mother in a broken condition. I am helpless to do anything. I pray to the authorities for justice,” said the woman’s son Rabindra Barik.
Two Government schemes, ‘Mahaprayan’and ‘Harischandra’ in Odisha are meant to provide a hearse to families and help them with the funeral.
“It is extremely distressing, we will take strict action,” chief minister Naveen Patnaik said on Majhi’s story.