BAMROLI: More than 47 people, including 44 children heading to school for final exams, drowned yesterday when their bus plunged off a bridge into a canal in western India. Their bodies have been recovered, but some children were still missing, said a senior police officer in Gujarat state. Four children were rescued. The accident occurred in Vadodara, 90km south of Ahmedabad. Police said the death toll could rise.
The state-owned public bus was carrying more than 60 children and some passengers from three villages in the region, officials said.
They said the driver lost control after one of the tyres burst and ploughed through a concrete railing on the bridge, plunging the bus into the canal.
“I was sitting in the last seat and suddenly I felt the bus going down,” said Sunil Thakore, 13, one of the few children who managed to swim to safety.
Two boys, who swam to safety, alerted villagers that the bus had fallen into the canal, witnesses said.
The driver of the bus, an assistant and a woman were among the dead, police said.
The children were studying at two separate schools and had taken the bus ride to reach their schools in time for their exams, police officers said.
Angry villagers said many children could have been saved if rescue operations started in time.
“For two hours I could see bodies floating in the canal, but nobody came to help us and all we could do was cry and scream for help,” said a villager from Bamroli, which lost 15 girls in the accident.
Television pictures showed grieving parents trying to identify their children from among rows of bodies laid out.
“Forty-four bodies have been fished out of the canal” which was 18m deep,” police said.
“We’re still investigating what caused the driver to lose control of the bus,” they said.
The flow of water into the canal from a dam has been stopped to help rescuers locate the missing people.
Many anxious parents, uncertain if their children were on the bus, were also seen rummaging through school bags recovered from the water to see if those belonged to their children.
The Gujarat government, which announced compensation of 100,000 rupees (BD972) for the families of the dead, said it would hold a high-level inquiry into the cause of the accident.
source: gulf-daily-news.com
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