A family struggling to come to terms with three deaths on a wedding night also had to visit three police stations to complete the formalities before they could claim the bodies and perform the last rites.
Torn between the jurisdictions of three police stations — Lake Town (where the accident happened), Tala (where RG Kar hospital is located) and Maniktala (where the Rathis live) — bereaved relatives recalled how they had to run from pillar to post for paperwork.
“We have no complaints against anyone but our system needs to change,” a relative said late on Tuesday.
Akshay Dujari, a nephew of Sarala Rathi, who lost her husband, son and mother-in-law in the crash on the night of her daughter’s wedding, said they had split the tasks among family members.
They stumbled on multiple obstacles, starting from transferring the bodies from the hospital’s Emergency to the hospital morgue, a short distance away.
“The first step was to be able to take the bodies to the hospital morgue. That could happen only after the medical certificates were prepared. As there were three bodies, the time taken was triple the normal time. The doctor on duty was helpful and was doing voluminous paperwork even after his shift was over,” Dujari said.
“However, such is the system that even after the medical certificates were issued, the doctor needed to prepare the death certificates, without which the bodies could not be accommodated in the morgue. For all this time, the bodies were lying outside the hospital on stretchers. Apparently, that’s the system.”
Another family member recalled how he hopped from Tala police station to Lake Town police station and then to the Maniktala police station area to get a councillor’s certificate and back to Lake Town police station to get the process completed.
“The biggest challenge was to get the whole process done by 2pm on Monday. Else, the post-mortem would be postponed to the next day, we were told,” he said.
A relative who signed all the official documents on behalf of the family wondered why the papers could not be transferred from one government office to another through email. “As if the shock of losing your dear ones is not enough. All these procedures… they cause harassment to the family of the deceased,” he said.
The family said they did not mind when there was a “human error” in writing the age of the victims or any delay caused while filling in a “very long” form, but it was the system that they felt hard done by.
The last of the problems the family faced was a mistake in the name printed on a certificate they got from the crematorium. “They printed Kamal Rathi instead of Kamala Rathi. We will get it rectified. We are not complaining as this is a human error. We only wish all this could have been done at a single place,” said a relative.