Having covered stories centred around hospitals for over a decade, sitting outside Intensive Care Units or hanging around morgues waiting for autopsy reports at odd hours has become second nature to me.
It was June 6, four days after one of the deadliest train accidents in recent memory in India. The collision involving three trains in the Balasore district of Odisha had claimed 291 lives and left over a thousand injured. After spending a stressful day at the accident spot, I was on my way to the State capital, Bhubaneshwar, 200 kilometres away. Night descended over the highway connecting Balasore to Bhubaneswar. Suddenly, on a whim, I asked the driver to take me to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Bhubaneswar instead of retiring for the day.
It is easier to mill around hospitals at night when activity ceases to be hectic and people are available to talk. It was dinner time when I reached. Some police officials sat in the committee room where the process of handing over bodies to claimants was underway. The officials asked me if I had eaten. They shared their food with me and began telling me about the challenges they were facing in ascertaining whether the bodies were being handed over to the right claimants. They were trying to collect the fingerprints and scan the iris of the bodies to find a match in their Aadhaar database in order to ascertain identities. However, it was becoming impossible to recover fingerprints from mutilated bodies, they said.
I did not have a full story that night, but I was curious about the use of biometrics in identifying bodies. The next day, I decided to show up early at AIIMS and spend the whole day in search of a story. The friendly chat of the previous day helped me get access to the committee room where the action was centred, while most mainstream and local media stood outside the hospital, trying to catch hold of any claimant for a bite, without verifying their antecedents.
Suddenly, I saw a flurry of activity in the corner of the committee room — Aadhaar officials were preparing to take their biometric machines and iris scanners somewhere else. They were accompanied by Railway officials. I told them I was a reporter and asked if I could trail them. Surprisingly, they agreed. We reached the Neurosurgery ICU. A white board outside stated that an unidentified patient who had suffered severe injuries was lying unconscious on Bed Number 01. The doctors were desperately trying to ascertain his identity.
I watched as nurses removed mittens from the patient’s hands so that the Aadhaar officials could capture his fingerprints. Unconscious patients in the ICU are made to wear mittens so that they don’t accidentally remove their ventilation devices. Next, the patient’s eyes were forced open and his iris was scanned. As I watched, I unknowingly grew attached to this patient lying on Bed Number 01. Who was he? Would biometrics help ascertain his identity and reunite him with his family?
This week, the doctors of the hospital told me that the patient’s identity had finally been confirmed. The process had taken a long time since the officials who had the patient’s biometric data were waiting for a match on their database of billions. The man was from Bihar. The officials tracked down his family and they, overjoyed to finally hear about him, came to Bhubanesar to meet him.
Reporting is not merely about going to the field, filing stories, and moving on to the next assignment. Just as tragedies and events affect victims and relatives, they affect reporters too. Some stories become particularly intriguing or compelling. We pursue them for however long it takes, for, like others, we too look for closure.
porechamaitri.m@thehindu.co.in
