For the last seven months, corpses covered in sheets — limbs peeking through — are routinely dumped inside civic-run Sion Hospital’s trauma centre, flouting all norms of human dignity and hygiene. Reason? The temporary room, called the dead body storeroom, where the bodies are kept in the time between death and panchnama, is locked since August 4, 2012. The corpses lying in the open are of those declared dead on arrival at the hospital.

Abandoned:The body of an unidentified burns victim from Antop Hill lying in the open in the trauma centre of Sion Hospital. PIC/Anuradha Varanasi