4 days on, a struggle to preserve 83 train tragedy victims' bodies

At the Balasore district hospital, next to a helpdesk strewn with macabre photographs of the dead, Krupa Devi sits slumped against a wall.

- Debabrata Mohanty

On Friday evening, from her home in Bihar’s Munger, she watched the news in horror, as television channels streamed visuals from the site of India’s worst rail accident in three decades featuring the Coromandel Express, a train her father Manoj Chaudhuri had boarded that morning from Howrah.

By Saturday, the 23-year-old was in Balasore, hunting for him. For the first two days, she had hoped he would be among the injured, but it was not to be. Since then, she has poured through photograph after photograph, body after body, travelled from the Balasore district hospital to the SCB Medical College in Cuttack to AIIMS in Bhubaneswar.

And in what is symptomatic of a growing challenge for the Odisha government and the railways; to combat which they have called in specialised containers, embalming experts and are beginning DNA sampling; Krupa Devi has yet to find her father.