Look for the number at Kilpauk Cemetery

Kilpauk Cemetery is numbering its graves. Started past year, the inaugural is present connected the location stretch. The workout is aimed astatine helping radical caput to the graves of their beloved departed without difficulty.

When a cemetery is bursting astatine the seams, clutter is inevitable, and locating a household sedate tin beryllium a challenge.

One of the oldest and biggest successful Chennai, Kilpauk Cemetery has been battling abstraction crunch and resultant problems. It launched this inaugural to mitigate the effect this concern tin person connected families maintaining a sedate astatine the cemetery. It goes manus successful manus with documenting and digitising records of families with a sedate astatine the cemetery.

The 15-acre cemetery has been divided into 34 zones arsenic portion of the numbering exercise, with each conception having 600 graves.

“Each of these graves is owned by a household and would person had 5 to 10 burials carried retired successful it,” says S. Bosco Alangar Raj, treasurer of the Madras Cemeteries Board Trust, which maintains the Kilpauk Cemetery.

The workout volition assistance the Trust support records and besides marque it casual for radical erstwhile they travel successful hunt of their household tomb. Due to expanding abstraction crunch, determination is often disorder successful identifying a tomb. The cemetery has graves starting from 1903 for Christian denominations specified arsenic Roman Catholic, Protestants and Church of South India, and is among the aboriginal movers successful presumption of adopting a multi-tier vault strategy and ash burials.

Digitising its records is an ongoing exercise, 1 that kickstarted successful 2005-2006. Bosco Alangar Raj says the large situation earlier the squad was to cross-check details mentioned successful the records earlier assigning a fig connected the grave. Because of the size of the graveyard, updating the records has been slow.

“In the future, erstwhile we contented a receipt arsenic portion of burial oregon sedate maintenance, the fig and portion volition besides beryllium entered. It becomes a grounds for the future,” helium says.

In a month’s time, we program to widen this numbering workout to the cemetery successful Kasimedu, the different cemetery maintained by the Trust, adds Bosco.