Train Accident Victims Identified with Facebook’s Help in India

Three dead bodies were identified by their family members when their photographs were uploaded onto Facebook by a government official. The Times of India reports that the people identified were said to be missing since the recent Kalka Mail (express train) accident in India in which over 80 people died near Kanpur, a city in North India.

It seems that no one had contacted the government officials claiming the bodies and so the official used Facebook, to get the bodies identified quickly by family members. It must be noted that India is one of the top three Facebook nations in Asia and the majority of the educated population (school, college youth and the working class) is on Facebook.

The photographs were posted on Facebook by the District Magistrate of Kanpur. He explained:

As we didn’t have any other option of reaching out to the claimants of these bodies, I thought of posting their photographs on Facebook.

Facebook has been increasingly used by people in India to spread photographs of missing people. But this was the first case (that we know of) when a dead body was identified through the social networking site. The magistrate added that:

I was sure that this step would help a person or a relative desperately searching for their loved one and, within no time, three claimants contacted us, inquiring about the bodies and providing the names and other details of the dead persons.

This incident shows that social networking, though time-consuming in so many ways, can be used to forge connections for practical, administrative purposes.

The government using Facebook to reach out to the public is not anything new. Governments across Asian countries have understood that Facebook and Twitter can be very handy tools and so they have tried leveraging these forms of social media to engage the public, especially the younger generation. Facebook was used by the government of India to educate and generate awareness for its census 2011 and expenditure plan.

Similarly, Taiwan’s President Maa Ying Jeou launched a Facebook page to connect with young Taiwanese netizens, and Singapore’s prime minister Lee had a Facebook Chat for an hour with the public in the month of May.

Using Facebook to reach the public as this District Magistrate did is commendable. But I fear that Facebook might also be notified soon by the government of India to give up its encrypted data for the government to monitor in the same way as it gave an ultimatum to Skype and Google.

Photo: News yolk