Source: BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6079870.stm
It is a matter of life and death for India's dwindling and tiny Zoroastrian Iranian or Parsi community in India's financial capital, Mumbai.
There are only 130,000 Parsis left around the world, of whom about 43,000 reside in Mumbai.
With deaths outweighing births, Parsis may be a dying community demographically but they are quite high on the Indian social ladder.
Leaders have been battling the group's steadily declining population for years and are encouraging members to increase their numbers to prevent their race from dying.
Now they must deal with the issue of how best to dispose of their dead as the centuries-old tradition of leaving the corpses to be devoured by vultures does not seem to work anymore.
With an average of three bodies being taken up daily to the Towers of Silence - the funeral place of the Parsis - and the vulture population in the city nearly extinct, a corpse takes months to decompose.