Legacy MattersXeni Jarden at Boing-Boing reports on India's human skeleton black market and the work of investigative journalist Scott Carney who writes at Wired magazine.
There are grave robbers in Calcutta who steal skeletons and sell them to medical supply companies in the U.S. and Europe.
Scott tells more of the story on his blog, India's Underground Trade in Human Remains.
It is pitch black and raining when I first meet Manoj Pal: a man who makes his living defleshing rotting cadavers. I am a hundred kilometers outside of Calcutta in a small village called Purbasthali where police confiscated more than 100 bright white human skeletons. The bones they found were on their way along a two hundred year old pipeline for human remains that begins on the banks of Indian rivers and ends in the sacred halls of medicine in Westerncountries. The skeletons Pal prepared could have fetch as much as $70,000 on the black market.
Manoj Pal is the grunt labor for the industry. Part of the dom, or grave tending, caste his job is the most grim. When bodies are brought to him or recovered from a nearby cremation ghat he binds them in mosquito netting and lets them soak in the river for a week. When the bodies were waterlogged and mostly consumed by fish and stray dogs he scrubs off the remaining flesh, dumps the bodies in a boiling solution of caustic chemicals and lets them dry in the sun.