VASCO
Vasco Police station on Friday afternoon was gifted a new hearse van from a donation through the Manda and Narayan Bandekar Charitable Trust.
Vasco-based industrialist and philanthropist Narayan Bandekar handed over the keys of the new Hearse Van to Mormugao DySP Salim Shaikh in the presence of Vasco PI Kapil Nayak, Traffic PI Shailesh Narvekar and others.
Speaking to media later, Mormugao DySP Salim Shaikh said the Hearse Van was the need of the hour for the Vasco Sub Divisional Police Office which caters to five major police stations in the taluka.
“Vasco SDPO caters to five major police stations of Vasco Police station, Mormugao Police station, Verna police station, Dabolim Airport Police station and Vasco Railway Police station. We have a large number of incidents like accidents, suicides and police have to register many cases of unnatural deaths through these incidents,” said DySP Shaikh.
“It is not appropriate for us to tell grieving family members to arrange for a hearse van and quite often, the municipal hearse van is also busy with their calls. This situation leads to many bodies either lying in the houses or on the roads for a long time, causing public outcry which creates a major issue for the police,” said Shaikh.
“In 2021, we registered around 174 unnatural death cases, 185 unnatural death cases in 2022 and 174 unnatural death cases in 2023, taking the total to 533 unnatural death cases in the last three years across all five police stations. This is a huge figure and we tried to reach out to the families with our hearse van, which is totally dilapidated but we are trying to repair the vehicle so that we have two vehicles with us to cater to the entire Mormugao Taluka jurisdiction.”
DySP Shaikh said social worker Shekhar Khadapkar and PI Kapil Nayak had played a key role and had gone to meet Narayan Bandekar, who immediately agreed to donate a new hearse van for the Vasco police station.
