Rickety vehicles multiply agony in last journey

Hyderabad: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” goes a proverb. One can find the quintessence of this in the much-touted free hearse service introduced by the Government of Telangana for the benefit of the poor.

The Health Department, professedly as a humanitarian gesture, introduced the service to transport the dead to their native places as private vehicles refuse to transport bodies. However, the initiative has started attracting strident criticism because age-old, rickety vehicles have been pressed into service, regardless of the consequences.

Instead of deploying brand new vehicles to implement the service, which is popular in Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha, the State government has commissioned decade-old vehicles, previously used for running ‘108’ services, for operating the hearse service.

One such vehicle, which was transporting a body to Shadnagar, 60 km away from Hyderabad, developed a snag en route and fumes started coming out of the engine. The vehicle was abandoned at Kothuru and the body had to be transported in another vehicle.

Talking to The Hans India, Krishna, a hearse vehicle driver, attributed the breakdown to defective vehicles.

In the Nanakramguda building collapse incident, several workers were killed. Some of them hailed from adjacent states of Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The State government took measures to dispatch the bodies to Vizianagaram through the hearse service. However, the vehicles developed mechanical faults during their long journey. Hardly had the vehicle run for two hours, when the engine got heated up and started emitting fumes. The bodies were delivered eight hours behind schedule as the vehicles ran for two hours and then had to halt for one hour to prevent the engine from getting overheated through the entire journey.

Talking to The Hans India, one Lakshman Rao said that the body of his younger brother was received in the morning, though they had been waiting all through the night to receive the body.

Another person transporting the body of relative said that the hearse vehicle’s tyre got punctured near Kodada. Neither a spare tyre nor a kit to change the tyre was available with the vehicle.

In another incident, a vehicle en route to Nizamabad broke down in the middle of the forest region, where no mobile phone signal is received. To convey message to officials, the driver had to walk several kilometers, a driver who wished to remain anonymous told The Hans India.

Another driver, Nagaraju, said that the vehicles were being run after attending to repairs on an ad hoc basis.

Satheesh Kumar Vempati