Twelve passengers were injured when an air-conditioned bus of the Telangana State Road Transport Corporation (TSRTC) ploughed into a roadside ditch along the weir of the Palair reservoir at Nayakangudem on the Suryapet-Khammam highway in the wee hours of Wednesday.
All the 12 passengers on board the ‘Rajadhani Express’ bus bound for Khammam had a narrow escape with minor injuries. Former CPI (M) MLA from Madhira K. Venkata Narsaiah was among those injured. The bus coming from Hyderabad veered to the left side of the road before slipping into the ditch on the edge of the weir of the reservoir when the driver applied sudden brake to avoid collision with an oncoming lorry, sources said. Passers-by rescued the passengers and shifted the injured to a hospital in Khammam.
Previous incident
In August last year, ten passengers of a private bus were killed after the vehicle they were travelling in plunged into the irrigation canal of the Palair balancing reservoir near Nayakangudem. The accident then evoked public outcry prompting the govt. departments to construct speed breakers and concrete crash barriers at accident-prone spots. Wednesday’s accident near Nayakangudem triggered concerns over lack of foolproof road safety mechanism on the Nayakangudem-Khammam stretch.
