A board outside the ICU at AIIMS, Bhubaneswar. , Photo Credit: Maitri Porecha
HFor over a decade, it has become second nature to me to listen to stories focused on hospitals, sitting outside intensive care units or visiting morgues at odd hours waiting for autopsy reports.
It was June 6, four days after one of the deadliest recent train accidents in India. Three trains collided in Balasore was in the district of Odisha took 291 lives and more than a thousand were injured. After spending a tense day at the accident site, I was on my way to Bhubaneswar, the state capital, 200 km away. Night has descended on the highway connecting Balasore to Bhubaneswar. Suddenly, all of a sudden, 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’s easier to walk around hospitals at night when activity is less hectic and people are available to talk to. When I reached it was time for dinner. Some police officers were sitting in the committee room where the process of handing over the bodies to the claimants was underway. The officials asked me whether I had eaten food. He shared his meal with me and started telling me about the challenges he was facing in ascertaining whether the bodies were being handed over to the rightful claimants. They were trying to collect fingerprints and scan the pupils of the bodies to find matches in their Aadhaar database to confirm identity. He said, however, that it was becoming impossible to recover fingerprints from the decomposed bodies.
I didn’t have the 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 looking for a story. The previous day’s friendly chat helped me reach the committee room, where the action was concentrated, while most of the mainstream and local media stood outside the hospital, trying to cut down any of the claimants, without verifying their antecedents.
Suddenly, I saw movement in the corner of the committee room – Aadhaar officials were preparing to move their biometric machines and iris scanners away. He was accompanied by railway officials. I told him I was a reporter and asked if I could trace him. Surprisingly, they agreed. We rushed to the neurosurgery ICU. It was written on a white board outside that an unknown patient with serious injuries was lying unconscious on bed number 01. The doctors were doing their best to establish his identity.
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I saw the nurses remove the gloves from the patient’s hands so that the base officer could take his fingerprints. Patients who are unconscious in the ICU are made to wear gloves so that they do not accidentally remove their ventilation equipment. Next, the patient’s eyes were forced open and the iris was scanned. As soon as I saw it, I unknowingly got attached to this patient lying on bed number 01. Who was he? Will biometrics help in establishing her identity and reuniting her with her family?
This week the doctors at the hospital told me that the patient’s identity had finally been confirmed. The process took a long time as the officials who had the patient’s biometric data were waiting to match their billions of databases. That man was a resident of Bihar. The officials traced his family and they were finally overjoyed to hear about him, coming to Bhubaneswar to meet him.
Reporting doesn’t just mean going out in the field, filing stories and moving on to the next task. Just as tragedies and incidents affect victims and relatives, they affect journalists. Some stories become particularly interesting or compelling. We pursue them as long as it takes because, like everyone else, we are looking for closure.
porechamaitri.m@thehindu.co.in