Calcutta got its third mortuary on Monday, a much-needed facility for the growing number of non-resident Calcuttans who leave the city for want of jobs and often miss seeing a departed family member one last time.

Peace World, located off the Park Circus connector, aims to almost double the city's capacity to preserve the dead until their families are ready for the last rites. The facility is currently equipped to keep eight bodies but will soon increase that number to 24.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation will run the new mortuary, where the fee for preserving a body for 24 hours has been fixed at Rs 1,000. The facility includes adequate parking space and a two-storey waiting area.

Peace Haven and Madeira's, located at Bow Barracks in central Calcutta, were until Monday the only two mortuaries in the city with a combined capacity of 17. Peace Haven, on Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, is where the body of former chief minister Jyoti Basu had been kept in 2010. The mortuary has space for 11 bodies while the one run by L. Madeira & Company can preserve six. At Peace Haven, the rate for 24 hours is Rs 1,800.

The shortage of mortuaries often forces bereaved families to take recourse to hiring industrial air-conditioners or buying blocks of ice to preserve bodies till a close one living elsewhere arrives.

"A relative of mine was working in South Africa when his mother died in Chandernagore. The family members first went to Peace Haven but there was no space there. They went to another place that was occupied as well. Finally, the family procured ice slabs and kept the body at home till the son arrived," recounted a resident of Uttarpara.

The difficulty in getting air-conditioners, coolers and blocks of ice often adds to the pain of bereavement. "It is like sprinkling salt on a wound. Already, people are sad at someone's passing away and being forced to try out various ways to preserve the body adds to their suffering," a CMC official said.

According to him, the shortage of facilities to preserve bodies was being felt more with every passing year. "The disintegration of the joint-family system isn't the only reason. With so many young people being forced by circumstances to move out of the city and leave their parents behind, it has become imperative to augment the capacity to preserve bodies."

While inaugurating the mortuary built on some space within the Hindu Burial Ground at Topsia, chief minister Mamata Banerjee said the government had been thinking about setting up the facility for some time. "When Sourav Ganguly's father died, the family wanted to preserve the body for some time. I was talking to Sovan Chatterjee and Bobby (Firhad) Hakim then about where to keep the body since there was no place other than Peace Haven. That's when we decided to build a new mortuary," she said.

"In the event of a calamity, there is no place to keep bodies. I remember there was a plane accident in Patna and some bodies had come here. There was no space to keep the bodies," Mamata recalled.

Although the CMC had been planning to build a mortuary for quite some time, finding a suitable place was a hurdle, mayor Chatterjee said.

The CMC had first thought about utilising a 25-cottah space in Nonapukurthat housed a defunct, British-era gas crematorium.

The facility had fallen into disuse three decades ago but the proposal to build a mortuary there was shelved following objections from the slum dwellers living adjacent to the defunct crematorium. "Fear of ghosts was the root cause of their opposition to the project," an official of the CMC's health department said.

A senior official of the CMC said Calcuttans understood the need to build more mortuaries in the city but were opposed to having one in their locality. Finding space within a burial ground was a smart move. Since the mortuary came up on land reserved for a burial ground, there was little opposition from any quarter.

"About 50 lakh people reside in Calcutta. There are five medical colleges and hospitals and about a dozen large private hospitals and nursing homes. In the absence of adequate space in mortuaries, people with family members and relatives living outside the city sometimes keep the dead in hospitals longer than required out of desperation," said Atin Ghosh, mayoral council member in charge of health in the CMC.