Seven people, including four members of a family, were killed on Tuesday in two separate accidents on National Highway 34 in Malda and Murshidabad districts of West Bengal, police said, adding to the growing number of fatalities in the country that has the world’s deadliest roads.
The first accident took place near the toll plaza at 18 Mile area of Malda’s Baishnabnagar, about 300km away from Kolkata, in which five people died. The SUV in which they were travelling was moving at a high speed and hit a dumper coming from the opposite direction. Police said the dumper was in the wrong lane.
”The deceased have been identified as Murli Prasad (64), Kaushalya Prasad (55), Munna Prasad (38), Pappu Prasad (30) and Sanjay Mondal (30). Sanjay was driving the car,” said an officer of Baishnabnagar police station.
The dead were residents of Bibigram area of Malda and returning after taking part in a wedding ceremony of a relative in Rampurhat of Birbhum district. The Prasads had a flourishing grocery business in Malda.
Locals rushed to the spot and extracted all the five people, who were bleeding profusely, from the mangled car and rushed them to Silampur rural hospital but were pronounced dead on arrival.
In the other incident, the driver of a commercial vehicle laden with ice cream and his helper were killed after their vehicle was hit from behind by a truck carrying tea leaves near the Mehdipur toll tax gate of Murshidabad district’s Nabagram. Both the vehicles were moving at a high speed.
The officer-in-charge of Nabagram police station Subrata Sikdar said they were yet to ascertain the identity of the dead men. Both the vehicles have been seized, he added.
The preliminary investigation suggested the driver dozed off and hit the vehicle in the front.
India witnessed 17 deaths and 55 road accidents every hour in 2016, one of the highest in the world, according to the report released by the Union road transport and highways ministry.
The report compiled by the ministry’s Transport Research Wing said road accidents killed 150,785 people across India in 2016 — a 3.3% jump from 2015 when 146,000 lakh road fatalities were reported.
