KARACHI: Few among the thousands of unidentified victims of the recent heatwave were able to be identified and given gravestones in place of identity codes, according to volunteers at the Edhi Foundation morgue.

Most of the unidentified and unclaimed bodies go unregistered with the relevant police and municipal authorities and the task has largely been left to charities — the Edhi Foundation in particular being the largest — to keep their record and bury them in their graveyards.

Know more: 32 deaths in Karachi take Sindh heatwave toll to 1,242

Historically, however, the job of determining the identities of unclaimed bodies, maintenance of their record and burial had been entrusted to police stations and local municipal units. Both of them avoid the job for unspecified reasons.

“Every police station is required to register the details of an unidentified body, fingerprint it and send it to the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) through the union council concerned to document the death and try to ascertain the identity from the available record with Nadra,” said a senior official, explaining the procedure.

However, officials in the city police admitted that their stations were not performing their duty as per their mandate and they usually handed bodies over to the Edhi Foundation to do the rest.

An official said police stations normally avoided showing more cases within their jurisdiction to present their areas with the least incidence of crime. Most of the unidentified corpses comprise drug addicts, beggars and poor unknowns.

“We are trying to change it all,” said an official in the provincial home department, adding that the Sindh government was in talks with Nadra officials to evolve a system to record and identify unclaimed bodies.

According to the city’s births and deaths bylaws devised in 1976, the area police are bound to report such bodies with the relevant municipality’s births and deaths wing. However, officials said police officials refrained from reporting unclaimed bodies, although there was a provision in the bylaws that called for the deaths of unidentified persons to be recorded for the compilation of an accurate mortality rate in the city.

The municipalities had been raising this matter with the police authorities, but no improvement in this situation had been made, officials added.

Nadra has become an authority on identification, and has issued 96 million computerised National Identity Cards. However, despite this huge feat in the country and abroad, the technology has not yet been used to identify at least 300 bodies every month — 10 or more daily — in the city to determine identity.

Officials at the Edhi Foundation revealed they received 10 to 12 bodies daily on average from the city which were unidentified.

“We receive these bodies through the police stations, keep them for three days in our morgue waiting for any claimants and bury those unclaimed in our graveyard in Mowachh Goth,” said Anwer Kazmi, a senior official with the charity.

The charity keeps photographs of the bodies as record and accords each one a serial number, which is also written on the grave in case someone arrives at the morgue trying to find a missing relative.

Morgue officials have scores of albums of the dead in their office, which they keep presenting to visitors for identification.

More than 250 bodies of victims of the recent heatwave in Karachi were unidentified at Edhi’s morgue, and have been buried. Officials at the morgue said people were still coming to them for identification and a few had identified them and given their relatives’ gravestone a name instead of a serial number.

“They exhumed the body like many others do and buried them in their community graveyards with properly placed gravestones,” shared an Edhi volunteer.

Mr Kazmi said his charity was in consultation with Nadra authorities as well to set up a system where fingerprints of the dead could be taken and sent to Nadra for identification.

The home officials said they were trying to evolve similar systems in the police forensics where police in-charges concerned would be required to fingerprint every unclaimed body and send them to a Nadra-collaborated facility operated by the police.

Meanwhile, the municipal health departments have also proposed that senior authorities raise the penalty on delay in the reporting of births and deaths. The bylaws require citizens to report births and deaths to the relevant municipalities within six months, or face a penalty of Rs500. These local bodies have requested the penalty be increased tenfold.

At present, a large number of people who die at their homes are not being reported either. Most death certificates are obtained by the offspring of government employees and those who have monetary stakes, such as transfer of property and insurance claims.

Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2015

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