Families of the victims of India’s worst train disaster in two decades struggled to reach the town where the tragedy occurred on Sunday. Many bodies remain unidentified and unclaimed because of the delay, local officials and doctors said.
At least 275 people died in Friday’s disaster near Balasore town. Many passengers are migrant workers, students and day laborers. Bodies of around 200 victims in and around the eastern Odisha town are yet to be claimed, officials and doctors said.
Many were seriously injured in the crash, making it difficult to identify them, he said, adding that most of the victims’ families live in towns and villages hundreds of miles away and are still trying to reach the area.
The state government on Sunday shifted around 100 unidentified victims to the mortuary of the main hospital in the state capital Bhubaneswar. About a dozen bodies remained in the auditorium of a small local school a few hundred yards from the disaster site, down from less than 100 on Saturday and fewer than a dozen bodies in a business park in Balasore on Sunday. The whereabouts of the rest were unclear.
At the business park, the local government put up photographs of unidentified victims and they posted the images online.
Authorities had placed the bodies on large blocks of ice in the business park and covered them with plastic sheets, but the ice was melting rapidly in the nearly 100-degree heat. Relatives who first arrived at the business park had to endure the shock of seeing the faces of the victims on a laptop. Then, if they see any resemblance to a loved one, they are taken for a closer look.
Rahul Kumar, a doctor at Bhubaneswar’s main hospital, said that the mortuary there is already full.
He is one of several doctors and officials who say that while DNA tests are needed to identify many of the bodies, the struggle of relatives to reach the area is the reason for the delay in getting the bodies.
“Most of these people are poor, and it can take them days to get to Bhubaneswar or here in this town,” said Dr. Kumar said.
Indian Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnav said that a special train has been started to take family members from the neighboring West Bengal city of Kolkata to Odisha. The local government of Odisha announced the operation of free bus service on the disrupted railway line.
