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.
