Odisha Train Accident: “Little To No Information About The Identity Of General Compartment’s Passengers”

Clouds Of Despair have surrounded Bhubaneswar. Desperate faces, some hopeful, most hopeless, rush to AIIMS Bhubaneswar in the search of their loved ones. It has been 2 days since the Balasore Train Tragedy took place. Most of the Dead bodies, which were earlier kept in makeshift morgues have been shifted to AIIMS Bhubaneswar.

One such makeshift morgue was in Bahanaga High school, just less than a kilometre away from the spot where this deadly accident took place. Two days after the incident some dead bodies in this morgue had started decomposing due to the lack of cold storage facilities.

Due to such lack of cold storages in most towns such as Soro, Bhadrak and even to an extent Cuttack, a lot of dead bodies from these places have been shifted to AIIMS Bhubaneswar, where better cold storage facilities exist.

The health system of Odisha lay bare bodied post these incidents. A lack of beds, hygiene and sanitation, clean drinking water and doctors was all visible to any observor.

In Fakir Mohan hospital in Balasore, which the Prime Minister had visited the previous day, many patients were forced to sleep on the floor due to the lack of beds. Food packets were distributed to the aggrieved in the hospital, as were distributed in all hospitals, but all of them uniformly lacked the number of sanitation workers and dustbins in order to maintain cleanliness of the hospital.

Besides the lack of basic health care facilitiesand sanitation, a class bias has also been seen in the treatment of victims of the accident.

On ground sources confirm, that the Government officials only have a list of missing people that were travelling from the AC compartment. The officials have little to no information about the identity of from which generally people coming from poorer economic background travel. This incident besides posing a question to the Indian Railways has laid bare the reality of Indian society at large.