Look for the number at Kilpauk Cemetery

Kilpauk Cemetery is numbering its graves. Started last year, the initiative is now on the home stretch. The exercise is aimed at helping people head to the graves of their dear departed without difficulty.

When a cemetery is bursting at the seams, clutter is inevitable, and locating a family grave can be a challenge.

One of the oldest and biggest in Chennai, Kilpauk Cemetery has been battling space crunch and resultant problems. It launched this initiative to mitigate the effect this situation can have on families maintaining a grave at the cemetery. It goes hand in hand with documenting and digitising records of families with a grave at the cemetery.

The 15-acre cemetery has been divided into 34 zones as part of the numbering exercise, with each section having 600 graves.

“Each of these graves is owned by a family and would have had five to ten burials carried out in it,” says S. Bosco Alangar Raj, treasurer of the Madras Cemeteries Board Trust, which maintains the Kilpauk Cemetery.

The exercise will help the Trust maintain records and also make it easy for people when they come in search of their family tomb. Due to increasing space crunch, there is often confusion in identifying a tomb. The cemetery has graves starting from 1903 for Christian denominations such as Roman Catholic, Protestants and Church of South India, and is among the early movers in terms of adopting a multi-tier vault system and ash burials.

Digitising its records is an ongoing exercise, one that kickstarted in 2005-2006. Bosco Alangar Raj says the major challenge before the team was to cross-check details mentioned in the records before assigning a number on the grave. Because of the size of the graveyard, updating the records has been slow.

“In the future, when we issue a receipt as part of burial or grave maintenance, the number and zone will also be entered. It becomes a record for the future,” he says.

In a month’s time, we plan to extend this numbering exercise to the cemetery in Kasimedu, the other cemetery maintained by the Trust, adds Bosco.