5 unidentified corpses found daily in Karnataka; 1 in Bengaluru districts

Bengaluru: On average, state police find at least five corpses every day with no records or means to be identified — 527 such bodies were officially reported in the first 90 days of this year. With Bengaluru Urban and Rural accounting for 114 of them, the two districts saw no less than one such case daily.
While data for April is being compiled, that for the three months preceding January 2022 also shows a similar trend in the state which witnessed 506 cases in about 92 days. But Bengaluru’s share is slightly lower during those months at two cases every three days. In fact, data between January 2021 and March 2022 depicts a similar trend for Karnataka.
Upon discovering such bodies, police first try matching them with all the missing complaints from across the state. Once this process is exhausted, they look at deaths by suicide or homicide and murder cases to find links.
In case of bodies that still do not find a match, the details are sent to police departments of all other states, whose personnel scan missing complaints and homicide cases in their respective jurisdictions.
Karnataka DG & IGP Praveen Sood told TOI: “In a majority of the cases, the bodies later find a match with missing persons or get linked to deaths by suicide or homicide. Very few, say an estimated 10% to 15% of the corpses, remain unidentified.”
Buried at govt facilities
Bodies that remain unidentified even after all efforts are buried at government burial grounds, a senior IPS officer said. “All such bodies must be buried and not cremated because in case some proof comes to light in future, we should be able to exhume them,” the officer explained.
According to data from the police department, of the 527 unidentified corpses in the first three months of 2022, 199 were found in March, of which 48 were from Bengaluru Urban and Rural.
In February, there were 153 such bodies, including 28 in Bengaluru, while January saw 175 corpses, 38 of which were from Bengaluru. Of the 527, only 49 or 9.2% were female and the other 478 were bodies of men. In 2021, there were a total of 1,791 unidentified corpses, of which 16% (282) were from the two Bengaluru districts and 13% (232) were women. The first three months of that year, comparable with this year, together saw 427 such bodies being discovered.