LAHORE: The administration of the Miani Sahib graveyard started a mortuary van service on Monday to facilitate the people shift bodies to the cemetery.

Miani Sahib is Lahore’s largest graveyard spread over about 1,200 kanal. Its management, which works under the city district, has been facing issues since long that has used to force it to refuse to allow the people burial place for their loved ones in the facility. However, the city administration and municipal corporation finally took up the matter, identified problems and removed some of them in recent days.

“Besides creating more space, we have also launched a mortuary van service to shift bodies and their burial to Miani Sahib. The charges for shifting body to graveyard would be Rs1,000. However, the body’s bath, coffin and other services would be free of cost. The people can call the mortuary van service by dialing 042-37238293 and 0314-4014569,” an official of the city district administration told Dawn.

“This service would be available only for shifting the body to Miani Sahib and not other graveyards of the city,” he clarified.

He said the graveyard was also being upgraded with provision of better security, online booking of graves, website, plantation of trees, sitting arrangement, creation of more paths/ passages, elimination of fake faith-healers, anti-encroachment squad etc.

Giving details of the issues that Miani Sahib was facing and the way the administration dealt with them, the official said: “The first issue was the lack of space for more graves. For this, the admin first identified the places occupied by the people in advance for burial of their family members. We launched a grand anti-encroachment operation that lasted for over a month and succeeded in retrieving around 52 kanal, creating space for over 8,000 new graves in the graveyard”.

At present, the officials were engaged in removing debris of structures razed by the anti-encroachment teams, he added.

Many parts of Lahore, the city of over 12m people, are facing shortage of graveyards. The existing cemeteries, other than the Miani Sahib, are filled to capacity, having no space left for new graves. However, Mian Sahib always remains on top of the Lahorites choice for burial of their loved ones since it is the oldest in the city.

The outgoing PML-N Punjab government had also taken up notice of the growing issues related to shifting, bath and burial of bodies in Lahore in particular and other parts of the province in general and established an authority (Shehr-i-Khamoshan Authority) a couple of years back. The authority developed a new and modern graveyard over a vast area in Kahna.

Published in Dawn, July 17th, 2018