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A Ganesh Nadar in Erwadi, Ramanathapuram
The Tamil Nadu police on Wednesday swooped down on the 15 so-called private mental asylums operating in Erwadi and ordered them shut, after freeing almost 500 inmates who had been living in subhuman conditions, chained to beds and posts.
The action followed an order issued by Ramanathapuram District Collector Vijay Kumar to shut down within a week all such shelters operating around the Erwadi dargah after 27 inmates of one such shelter were roasted to death in a fire on Monday morning.
The victims had all been chained to their beds and could not escape when the fire broke out. The collector has now banned the use of chains in asylums with immediate effect.
All the owners of the shelters were sitting at the local police station on Wednesday with their registers, locating the relatives of those left in their 'care', because the collector had ordered that all the inmates would have to go back home or be shifted to proper hospitals.
No one would be allowed henceforth to stay at any of the shelters unaccompanied by a relative.
Telegrams were being sent out by the score -- so much so that the local post office had run out of telegram forms by evening -- asking the relatives to come and fetch their kin.
However, the implementation of the order was not without its own share of problems.
A woman from Bombay who had come to collect her son, admitted at the Limras Mental Hostel, complained to the police that the shelter owner was not allowing her to take him away because he claimed that she still owed him Rs 10,000.
The woman shouted at the police officers, saying no one had told her to bring money.
The police said the tehsildar (block officer) would decide on the matter. The tehsildar in turn passed the buck to the collector, who deputed the revenue divisional officer to look into the problem and arrive at some solution.
Some interesting facts about the 'shelters' also came to light with the police taking action against the owners.
Of the 500 or so people admitted there, only 33 are women. The youngest inmate was 15 years old while the oldest was 70.
Also, all but one of the owners of the shelters had a history of mental illness themselves. They had all come to Erwadi for faith healing and stayed on thereafter to start the business, after being declared cured.
The sole exception to this was the dargah's manager, Sirajuddin.
The local people, meanwhile, were very pleased at the government's belated action. They told rediff.com that the patients were being treated worse than animals when they were brought to the dargah every evening.
They were always brought there in chains, the villagers said, and if anyone so much as stepped out of line, they were beaten up.
Meanwhile, the remains of the victims of Monday's blaze were buried in a mass grave at the Thothamavadi burial grounds near Erwadi on Tuesday. The relatives of only two victims came forward to identify them. But they too were reluctant to take charge of the remains.
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