Madhya PradeshAt least 30 passengers, four of them critical, were injured when a private bus carrying migrant laborers for Diwali overturned in Madhya Pradesh’s Guna district on Sunday. The bus was coming from Surat in Gujarat, the accident took place on Guna bypass road, six kilometers from Guna district headquarters, the official said.
Notably, this is the second such accident of a private bus passing through Madhya Pradesh in two days. On Friday night, a Uttar Pradesh-bound bus, mostly carrying migrant laborers home for Diwali, rammed into a trailer truck from behind in Rewa district, killing 15 people and injuring 40 others. The bus was on its way to Kanpur, about 422 km from Guna, when the bus crashed on Sunday afternoon, the official said.
In view of the Diwali festival starting on Monday, public and private transport is overcrowded as people try to travel to their hometowns along with their family members to join the festivities. “The injured passengers have been admitted to Guna District Hospital. Of the four injured, one has been taken to Gwalior for advanced health care.”
“We will conduct a medical examination of the driver, who was injured, to know whether he was intoxicated,” Baghel said. He said that the passengers claimed that the bus had more than 100 passengers against the capacity of 52. Passengers said the bus left Surat for Kanpur at around 10.30 am on Saturday—a distance of about 1,200 km. It had stopped for breakfast near a toll plaza on Guna bypass at around 11 am on Sunday. The SDM said that after an hour the bus resumed its onward journey around noon, but the accident took place after 10 minutes.
Shortly before the accident, some women passengers had asked the bus driver to slow down but he did not pay heed. “The bus leaned on one side, and in no time overturned on the other side,” the SDM quoted the passengers as saying. Baghel said that as per preliminary investigation, the driver of the bus lost control of the vehicle while trying to save a motorcyclist who came in the middle of the road.
One of the injured passengers, identified as Sudhir, told reporters at the hospital that the bus was overloaded and the driver appeared to be drunk. He said that the bus was traveling at high speed which led to the accident. Sudhir, who worked in a Surat-based company, was returning home with his father.
Surat is one of the few urban centers in India, attracting thousands of migrants from within Gujarat and from states such as Odisha, UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Telangana and West Bengal. These workers are mostly employed in sectors such as textile manufacturing, dyeing, power loom, fabric cutting and packing, construction and diamond cutting and polishing.
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