At the site of the accident at Khatauli in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday. (Express Photo by Praveen Khanna)
A brother and a father waited for bodies at the Muzaffarnagar post-mortem house at 10 am on Sunday, as did 50 residents of a village, their fate tied together by the Kalinga Utkal Express accident that derailed on Saturday killing 22 people.
At the post-mortem facility, while accountant Anil Kumar Verma took down phone numbers and spoke to the families of the dead, constable Ramvaran Prajapati from Morena, Madhya Pradesh, approached him. He was looking for his brother, retired railway employee Rajaram Prajapati.
Rajaram, 56, was travelling to Hardwar with his daughter, wife and many from his village for a holy Ganga dip. Ramvaran had suffered the shock of receiving the bodies of his 12-year-old niece Arti and his sister-in-law Sukhdevi Prajapati (50). But the search for his 56-year-old brother was proving futile.
“My brother’s wife’s and daughter’s bodies are here, but I am unable to contact my brother. Can you please ask hospitals in Meerut?” Ramvaran explained to Verma.
As the day would progress, it would turn out that Rajaram too had died. His body was in a hospital in Meerut. “It is sad that my brother Rajaram, a retired railway employee who worked as a line man, died because of the fault of the Railways,” Ramvaran said. The Prajapatis came to know about the accident from some of the15 other people from Morena with whom Rajaram and his family were travelling.
“We were shocked when some of the survivors called us up. We rushed to Muzaffarnagar and enquired in all places possible, but could not find them. An SDM-level officer called one of our neighbours in Morena. He had found the number on one of the bodies,” he said, explaining how he tracked down the bodies of his niece and sister-in-law.
By 10 am Sunday, 11 out of the 20 bodies found had been claimed.
Inside the post-mortem house, four doctors started a procedure on a body and around 50 people of Jat Munjera village of Muzaffarnagar waited to take home 32-year-old Pramod Kumar. He was married, had two children and worked as a pharmacist in a government medicine shop in Meerut. He made the hour’s journey from Muzaffarnagar to Meerut and back every weekday.
His brother Sonit said the family heard about the accident and immediately called on Pramod’s phone. “We kept calling, but he did not pick it up,” the brother said. “We then came to the accident site.” As they searched in Khatauli, where the train had tripped tracks, Sonit said he prayed. He was now waiting for the post-mortem to end.
Waiting amid the bodies placed on slabs of ice was 55-year-old Sushil Aggarwal. His 28-year-old son, Sumit, worked at a bank in Meerut and came home to Saharanpur on weekends. On Saturday, he was running late. At 3.30 pm, Sumit called his father to tell him he would take a different train. “As fate would have it, he travelled on the Utkal Express,” Sushil said. The family identified the body on Saturday evening. “We were planning to get him married. Everything is over now,” said the father.
Uttar Pradesh Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar said on Sunday night that the death toll in the accident is 22. He said 203 people are injured. On Sunday, Muzaffarnagar’s Government Railway Police registered an FIR under IPC sections that deal with death due to negligence (304 A), negligent conduct with respect to machinery (287) and culpable homicide not amounting to murder, among others. The charges are against unknown persons. An officer said: “We are waiting for the inquiry report from the Railways after which we will name the accused in the FIR.”
The deceased are from Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Agra and Lalitpur in Uttar Pradesh and Gwalior and Morena in Madhya Pradesh, as well as Delhi, said chief medical officer, Muzaffarnagar, P S Mishra.
