Plastic bag vests, pile-up of bodies hamper morgue ops

In May, a massive storm hit Delhi, and the display board at the entrance of Sabzi Mandi mortuary—the city's oldest—broke off and fell onto the main road.

- Hemani Bhandari

Seven months on, the board is yet to be reinstalled, and there are no other markers; people visiting the mortuary for the first time often cannot find it.

But for the staff here, this is the least of their problems given that the facility is functioning without essentials, such as plastic aprons, body bags, sealing wax, viscera jars, and boxes, among other items.

Now, these staffers either shell out personal money for these essentials, use makeshift substitutes, or are dependent on the largesse of others, usually police, to carry out their mandate of conducting autopsies.

A long history of neglect

Set up in 1960, the Sabzi Mandi mortuary is attached to the government's Aruna Asaf Ali Hospital, conducts 15-20 post-mortem examinations a day, and has a capacity to store 30 bodies at a time.

The morgue has been at the centre of several high-profile cases—the autopsy of at least 400 people killed in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots were carried out at this facility, as was the autopsy of Naina Sahni in the 1995 "tandoor murder" case.

However, a lack of political will and bureaucratic oversight has led to the facility operating without even needles to sew bodies back after a post-mortem examination is conducted.

Mortuary officials said they are dependent on the hospital for supplies, and have written to them multiple times over the past two years, but to no avail.