Srinagar: Eleven students including nine females were killed and eight others wounded, when the minibus they were travelling in skidded off the road and plunged into a deep gorge in Jammu and Kashmir’s southern Shopian district on Thursday.
The students enrolled at a private computer training institute in Surankote area of frontier Poonch district were heading towards Dhobijan in neighbouring Shopian for day picnic when the mishap took place, the officials said. The seriously injured students have been brought to a Srinagar hospital for specialised treatment. The hospital sources said that the condition of the five of them is “very critical.”
The police said that the accident took place along the historic Mughal Road at Lal Ghulam near the 11,434- feet-high “Peer Ki Galli” mountain pass in the Pir Panjal Range which connects Poonch with Shopian.
An official spokesman here said that the police and district (Shopian) administration along with the volunteers of Rahmat-e-Aalmeen Society (a local NGO) started rescue and relief operation immediately after learning about the mishap.
The injured were first taken to the district hospital in Shopian and later the seriously injured among them were shifted to Srinagar, he said.
Jammu and Kashmir’s governor Satya Pal Malik expressed grief over the loss of lives and, in a condolence message, conveyed his sympathies to the bereaved families and prayed for peace to the departed souls. He also announced an ex-gratia of '5,00,000 each to the next of the kin of the deceased.
Such accidents are not uncommon in J&K particularly in hilly Chenab valley and Pir Panjal regions. Bad and narrow roads, over-speeding, rash driving, violation of rules and the ill-health of vehicles are known to be the main causes for increasing incidence of road mishaps.
The J&K government data reveals that in first eleven months of 2018 as many as 908 people were killed and 7,250 injured in 5,529 road accidents across the state. A study conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in 2017 that examined cases from the year 1996 to 2016 had said that J&K tops the list in “deaths and disabilities caused by road accidents”.
