One person died and 10 others were injured when a bus carrying around 40 migrant workers collided with a fruit-laden truck in Odisha’s Khurda district on Tuesday morning, police said.
Police officials said the bus carrying the migrants working in hotels in Hyderabad was on its way to Banki area of Khurda district when the bus driver lost control over the vehicle and rammed into the truck at Kuhudi on National Highway-16.
AP Swain, Khurda’s superintendent of police, said assistant driver K Srikant died and 10 migrant workers received minor injuries in the accident.
Police have recovered the body of the assistant driver and sent it for a post-mortem examination. The injured migrants will soon be sent to their destination in another bus after being treated at a local hospital.
The migrant workers from Kendrapara, Puri and Cuttack districts had hired the bus and had left Hyderabad late on May 3.
It is the fourth such road accident in as many days involving Odia migrant workers, who are eager to return home with no work in their hands following the national lockdown from March 25.
A bus carrying migrants from Gujarat’s Surat had hit a roadside concrete wall on May 2 on a hilly road at Kalinga Ghat on Kandhamal-Ganjam border that left two dead and several others injured.
After that, Odisha transport minister Padmanabha Behera had stopped plying of the migrant buses on the hilly route citing lack of drivers’ experience.
On May 3, at least three migrant workers were injured when the bus ferrying them from Surat met with an accident on the same hilly road of Kalinga Ghat.
The same day, three migrant workers and two bus staff were injured when a bus carrying 50 people from Surat to Odisha swerved off the Nagpur-Amaravati National Highway at Karanja and landed in a roadside ditch.
So far, more than 6,500 migrant workers have come back to Odisha in over 700 buses in about a week.
Once they reach the state, all the migrant workers have to stay in quarantine centres for 14 days. After the completion of their quarantine, they will be paid Rs 2,000 each.
