Dr Bharat Bajpai is the head of Mortuary at a government hospital in Indore.
In the last eight years, this government employee from Madhya Pradesh has not taken a single day off. Dr Bharat Bajpai, the head of the Mortuary in a government hospital in Indore, and two of his team members earned a special mention in the Limca Book of Records in 2011 for not taking a single day off for 1,200 days.
Three years later, Dr Bajpai continues to work without taking a single day off. He is the head of the Mortuary in the city's Gobind Ballabh Pant Government Hospital. In a career spanning two decades, he has conducted over 10,000 postmortems.
"We should be as useful as possible I believe, we should help people as much as we can. I have never worked with the expectation of any post, reward or honour. I do not even have a name plate at my home. I never seek any publicity for what I do; it is all God's will," he said.
But the infrastructure of the mortuary at this hospital is not quite as high as the commitment level of the team running it. The post-mortems are conducted in a room which used to be a public toilet. Another room, in which post-mortems are supposed to be conducted, has not been constructed completely.
The contractor building the room reportedly received only the first installment of his due payment for the work from the state health department. Funds to get a body freezer and better equipment have been held up for over a year, in spite of being approved by the authorities.
Santosh, an office assistant with the post-mortem unit, was also part of the team felicitated by the Limca Book of Records. "The working condition here is not that good. We manage to do our work but yes, there are problems. The post-mortem room is very small. If there are too many dead bodies, we face problems," he said.