CHENNAI: Mayor unearths dead secrets of Besant Nagar burial ground

Pic courtesy: moviegallery.blogspot.com

By G Saravanan

Published in The New Indian Express, Chennai, on June 9, 2010:

CHENNAI: Mayor M Subramanian donned the hat of a detective on Tuesday in a bid to expose corruption practised by staff at the Besant Nagar burial ground and suspended the in-charge of the facility, K Arumugam, and transferred two other staff for cheating the public.

The Mayor, who was at the burial ground to oversee ongoing improvement works, unexpectedly asked Arumugam to present the logbook of daily cremations (Once purely a burial ground, the facility now does only cremations).
In casual conversation, when the Mayor asked the trio whether they collected any fee from families (cremation at Corporation burial grounds had been made free of charge two years ago), they denied it. Subramanian, however, was not convinced with the reply.
So, he looked up the logbook for the telephone numbers of the eight families that had used the services of the facility on Monday and called them, speaking to them as a staff member. The families without realising who he was, told him that they had each paid between Rs 1,000 and Rs 1,500. Having found the truth, the Mayor suspended Arumugam and transferred the two assistants.
This was not the first time that the Mayor had assumed the role of a sleuth to expose corruption in this manner. It may be recalled that in November 2008, he had suspended two burial ground staff at Moolakothalam after posing as a relative of a person who had come to employ their services.