Chandigarh, September 5: As many as 38 people, including women and children, sustained injuries after a tourist bus rammed into a stationed Punjab roadway bus on national highway- 1 outside the Phagwara bus stand here on Monday.
Police said that the pilgrims were going to Haridwar from Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu and Kashmir while the stationed roadway bus was about to leave for Ludhiana.
Injured are Maal Devi, Hari Prasad, Sudhir Mandal, Leela Devi, Suriya Nath, Lalita Devi, Rakesh Kumar, Jatinder Kumar, Kushaleya Devi, Sankar Prasad, Shiv Bachan, Prabhat Devi, Kamla Devi, Prabha Devi, Vidhya Devi, Kidar Nath, Bhago Devi, Shiv Bachan, Lakshami Datta and others . All of them are from Bhagalpur district of Bihar.
Passengers said that they were asleep when the accident took place. As per the information, Phagwara police rushed to the spot and admitted the injured in the local civil hospital.
Phagwara superintendent of police (SP) Parminder Singh Bhandal said, “ The tourist bus conductor Gaund Das of West Bengal has suffered fractures while bus helper Janardhan Yadav who has sustained severe injuries, were referred to civil hospital Jalandhar.” He said, “Proper arrangements have been made by the health authorities.” As per police sources, the accident took place after the tourist bus driver dozed off and lost control over the steering.
The roadway bus conductor Amrik Singh of Jaloor village and driver Balkar Singh of Dhinda village in Sangrur sustained minor injuries. Police said that there were only about seven passengers in the bus.
MLA Som Parkash, mayor Arun Khosla and Phagwara sub- divisional magistrate (SDM) Jyoti Bala Mattu also visited the hospital to oversee the injured in hospital. A case is yet to be registered in this regard.
