Madhya Pradesh: 30 hurt as UP-bound bus carrying labourers home for Diwali overturns in Guna district

Image Source : FILE/REPRESENTATIVE Shortly before the accident, some women passengers had asked the bus driver to slow down but he did not pay heed.

Madhya Pradesh: At least 30 passengers were injured, four of them seriously, when an over-packed private bus carrying migrant labourers to Uttar Pradesh for Diwali overturned on Sunday in Madhya Pradesh's Guna district, an official said. The bus was coming from Surat in Gujarat, the official said, adding the accident occurred on the Guna bypass road, 6 km from the Guna district headquarters.

Notably, this is the second such accident involving a private bus transiting through Madhya Pradesh in two days. On Friday night, an Uttar Pradesh-bound bus, mostly carrying migrant labourers home for Diwali, rammed into a trailer truck from behind in Rewa district, killing 15 persons and injuring 40 others. The official said the bus was headed towards Kanpur, around 422 km away from Guna, when it met with the accident at noon on Sunday.

In view of the Diwali festival beginning Monday, public and private transport are overcrowded as people are trying to rush to their hometowns to be with their family members to ring in the festivities. “The injured passengers have been admitted to the Guna district hospital. One of the four injured has been rushed to Gwalior for advanced health care," Guna Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) Virendra Baghel told reporters. According to some passengers, the driver of the bus was drunk and the vehicle was speeding.

"We will conduct a medical test of the driver who also sustained injuries to know if he was inebriated," Baghel said. He said the passengers claimed the bus had more than 100 passengers against its capacity of 52. Passengers said the bus set off from Surat around 10.30 am on Saturday for Kanpur- a distance of around 1,200 km. It halted around 11 am on Sunday for breakfast near a toll plaza at the Guna bypass. After an hour, the bus resumed its onward journey around noon but met with the accident after 10 minutes, the SDM said.

Shortly before the accident, some women passengers had asked the bus driver to slow down but he did not pay heed. "The bus tilted on one side, and shortly on the other side before it overturned," the SDM said quoting the passengers. As per the preliminary investigation, the driver of the bus lost control of the vehicle while trying to save a motorcyclist who had come in the middle of the road, Baghel said.

One of the injured passengers, identified as Sudhir, told reporters at the hospital that the bus was overloaded and the driver looked drunk. The bus was driven at a high speed which caused the accident, he said. Sudhir, who works in a company in Surat, was returning home with his father.

Surat is among the few urban centres in India which attract thousands of migrants from within Gujarat and from states like Odisha, UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Telangana, and West Bengal. These workers are employed mostly in sectors such as textile manufacturing, dyeing, power loom, cutting and packing of cloth, construction, and diamond cutting and polishing.