Goa cemetery: A place for the dead, irrespective of caste, community, creed, religion

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6718542.ece

The Times
July 18, 2009

Crematorium-cum-cemetery proposed to deal with India’s dead

by Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

Death may be the great leveller, but in India the fate of expired citizens has never been straightforward.

Each religious group — from high-caste Hindus with their sandalwood funeral pyres to the Zoroastrian Parsis and their Towers of Silence, where corpses are hoisted to be picked clean by vultures — has its own death rites. Many of the ceremonies are ancient, but as India’s population grows, the space to perform them is running out.

This week an official in Goa, the holiday state beloved of British backpackers, proposed a solution: a vast publicly funded crematorium-cum-cemetery, the first to be open to every Indian, regardless of religion or caste.

“Tensions among different groups are escalating as we run short of land and rival groups compete with each other to carry out their traditions,” Ramakant Khalap, the chairman of the Goa Law Commission, which was created to simplify legal processes in the state, told The Times. “We need to step forward and ensure that the dead — irrespective of caste, community, creed, religion — find a place under the open sky if they expire in Goa.”

Mr Khalap has in mind a “serene and scenic” park devoted to the departed, which he hopes will become a tourist attraction. He expects to get official approval for the plans next week.

The site would be loosely modelled on the Arlington National Cemetery in the United States, where more than 300,000 people are buried.

The plans come as India, which accounts for 17 per cent of the world’s population but only 3 per cent of its land, faces a crisis over how it disposes of its dead.

More than 80 per cent of Indians may be destined for cremation, but space will still have to be found to bury more than 200 million Muslims, Christians and Dalits (Untouchables) over the next 70 years.

A shortage of graveyards is stirring resentment. In the capital, Delhi, a lack of Muslim burial grounds became a big issue in this year’s general election. Families were angry that graves were having to be reused frequently. In Gujarat, Dalit communities often complain of graves being dug up.

Cremation presents its own problems. The Ganges river is chronically polluted, partly because of the disposal of millions of partially burnt Hindu bodies in the sacred waterway.

Environmentalists are calling for “green” cremation ovens, which reduce bodies to ash, to replace the traditional open-air wooden pyres.

India’s Parsi community also faces a crisis. The vultures they depend on to pick clean the bodies of their dead are on the verge of extinction, killed off by pesticides. A captive breeding programme has been suggested as a possible solution.

In Goa, Mr Khalap said that the annual influx of 1 million tourists into the state, which has a population of only 1.5 million, had added to the region’s challenges. “Deceased foreigners can be very problematic,” he said. “Knowing what to do with them has been very difficult. Soon, at least, we will have somewhere to put them.”