The police took the body to the Soro Community Health Centre (CHC), where it lay for four hours making the body stiff and hard to carry.
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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.
The government hospital workers hung the bundled up dead body to a pole due to the lack of an ambulance.
Despite the fact that the railway police was well aware of the incident, two of their personnel reached the hospital after a delay of 12 hours to take the body of Salamani Barik, a 76-year-old widow, to Balasore, it said. Railway Police (GRP) was informed; its personnel reached the hospital only in the evening, nearly 12 hours later. When hiring an auto-rickshaw looked expensive, the police allegedly asked a sweeper to arrange for the body to be taken to the station.
Majhi has said despite all efforts, he failed to get any help from hospital authorities and had no other alternative than to wrap the body in a cloth and start walking to his village Melghara in Rampur block, about 60 km from Bhawanipatna. They then carried the body in the sack all the way from the hospital to the railway station on their shoulders on a bamboo pole. “But who would act on our complaint”, Behera’s son Rabindra Barik told The Indian Express.
A day after a man from Kalahandi district was seen carrying his wife’s corpse on his shoulder, another shocking video has surfaced from Odisha’s Balasore.
Taking suo motu notice of the case, Odisha Human Rights Commission chairperson B K Mishra on Thursday issued notice to the Inspector General, GRP, and Balasore District Collector, asking them to order a probe into the incident and submit a report within four weeks.
Balasore: After a tribal man’s 10-km walk with his wife’s body on his shoulder drew widespread flak, another horrifying incident from Odisha has come to the fore.
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“It is extremely distressing, we will take strict action”, chief minister Naveen Patnaik said on Majhi’s story.
