Dikhyaa Mohanty 
According to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s announcement on Friday, the 65-year-old Bahanaga High School in Odisha’s Balasore district, where the corpses of railway disaster victims were held, would be entirely destroyed and rebuilt as part of the state’s 5T project. After meeting with Balasore Collector Dattatraya Bhausaheb Shinde, members of the school managing committee, panchayat representatives, teachers, and students via videoconferencing to get their opinion in this regard, Chief Secretary Pradeep Jena, 5T Secretary VK Pandian, and other concerned officials took the decision.
In the presence of the members of the school management committee and officials from the Works Department, demolition work began this morning. Although the bodies were cleaned and sanitized by Fire Service personnel, students and teachers had expressed reluctance to go to class because classrooms and the hallway had been used to line up the bodies, many of them disfigured, even though the memories of the nightmare experience of the tragedy were still fresh in their minds. The authorities anticipated that when the school returned after summer break, there might be no students present because the neighborhood claimed that several of the rooms still had bloodstains in them.
“Considering children’s mental health, a decision was taken in the meeting to demolish Bahanga Bazar High School and the primary and elementary schools in its vicinity. It will be developed into a model school under 5T initiative,” Pandian said.
In order to allay the pupils’ dread of the building, awareness campaigns will also be held. Notably, after being removed from the wrecked carriages, the corpses of the Bahanaga Bazar railway disaster victims were sent to the school. Later, those were moved to a large structure on the outskirts of Balasore town. Later, the unidentified bodies were sent to morgues in hospitals located in Bhubaneswar.
