In yet another accident along the Pune-Mumbai Expressway, five persons standing near an exit point on a stretch near Khandala were crushed to death late on Sunday after a speeding tempo crashed into them.
A sixth person who was part of the group sustained grievous injuries after the tempo, whose driver allegedly could not control the vehicle owing to its speed, turned on its side at a sharp bend, said police authorities at the Khopoli police station.
The deceased have been identified as Pradeep Prakash Chole (38); Amol Balaji Chilme (30); Narayan Ram Gundale (27) and his elder brother, Nivrutti (30); and Govind Nalwad (30). The injured person has been identified as Balaji Harishchandra Bhandari (35).
All six hailed from Latur district.
According to the police, the accident occurred sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight on Sunday.
“The six deceased and injured, who worked at the Talegaon MIDC, were travelling on three bikes and were returning from a picnic in Alibaug. They had stopped by the roadside to attend nature’s call when tragedy struck,” said a police official.
All the six persons were immediately rushed to a nearby hospital by the Expressway Emergency Response Team. While four of them were declared brought dead on arrival, one succumbed to injuries during treatment.
The use of technology and surveillance equipment notwithstanding, accidents owing to rash driving continue unabated along the Mumbai-Pune expressway.
In November last year, a car rammed into a tanker, killing four persons of a family and injuring two more.
In that case, the mishap had occurred in the the morning along the expressway stretch near the Khalapur toll plaza with the driver of the vehicle losing control and ramming into the rear of the stationary HP gas tanker. It was the second major accident to take place on the expressway in less than a month.
Earlier, on November 4, 2019, five persons were killed and 30 others injured after a private passenger bus turned turtle and fell into a valley near Khandala.
The erstwhile Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Shiv Sena government in 2016 had deployed drones for the first time to rein in incidents of rampant lane-cutting and overspeeding on the e-way.
A 2018 study by a road safety research firm, JP Research India (JPRI), said that 38% of the accidents that occurred on the expressway were due to the driver exceeding the 80 kmph limit.
The finding of the study, which was based on an analysis of 110 accidents that occurred last year on the expressway, also found that 56% of all accidents occurred between midnight and 9 a.m.
