Mohd. Wahed barely slept on the night time of November 2. The 32-year-old poultry transporter saved staring on the strings of balloons, candles and platters set out for 100-odd friends in his modest Kishanbagh residence in Hyderabad, imagining the second he would lastly maintain his 40-day-old daughter for the primary time. By daybreak, his wait was virtually over: his spouse Saleha Begum (20), her father Mohd. Khalid (43) and child Zaheera Fatima had been already on their means from her mother and father’ home in Tandur, roughly 120 kilometres away. The home and Wahed had been prepared for his or her welcome. However the bus bringing them residence by no means arrived.
Round 7.10 a.m., on the Mirjaguda stretch of Nationwide Freeway 163, the Telangana State Highway Transport Company (TGSRTC) bus collided head-on with a gravel-laden lorry. The influence crushed the entrance of the car, splitting open the 44-seater and burying it underneath tonnes of gravel. Nineteen individuals had been killed immediately.
Rescue staff discovered Saleha, a homemaker, within the mangled wreckage, her arms wrapped round her daughter. Their our bodies and that of her father had been taken to the Group Well being Centre (CHC), colloquially referred to as Authorities Space Hospital, about six kilometres away.
“This was the child’s first journey residence,” says Wahed’s brother, Waseem. “Saleha went to her mom’s place after supply, as is our customized. The cradle ceremony was set for November 5. Wahed had spent so much on decorations, jewelry and meals. He hadn’t even seen his daughter since she was born. He’s inconsolable.”
Saleha’s father labored in transport and packaging, the one incomes member of his household in Tandur, a city in Vikarabad district.
The crash website at Mirjaguda nonetheless bears the marks of that morning with sand poured unexpectedly over blood stains, lengthy darkish skid marks etched throughout the asphalt, shards of glass and jagged items of steel half-buried within the mud.
From a distance, the bus resembles a big crushed tin can. Its blue body lies break up open, the roof peeled again like paper. The motive force’s seat is flattened, the entrance wheels twisted sideways underneath a mound of gravel. Solely the rear portion — a bent stretch of chassis and some blue steel seat frames — suggests it was as soon as a passenger bus.
It was round 5.50 a.m. on November 3, when the bus from Tandur depot started its journey in the direction of Hyderabad. On board had been greater than 70 passengers — college students heading to courses, office-goers clutching their luggage, an aged man on his method to a hospital appointment and households like Saleha’s.
The freeway, barely 22 metres huge, snakes by way of open land and sharp, unmarked bends. Years of neglect have left it rutted and scarred, breaking into patches of potholes and unfastened sand that drifts onto the asphalt from close by fields. There aren’t any streetlights, no median, no warning indicators of curves or dips forward.
Survivors recall that the lorry swerved to dodge a pothole and drifted barely into the alternative lane simply because the RTC bus approached. The collision was instantaneous, and catastrophic.
Officers and media collect close to the wreckage of a tipper lorry after it collided head-on with a Telangana RTC bus close to Chevella, in Ranga Reddy district on November 3.
| Picture Credit score:
NAGARA GOPAL
The lorry’s load burst ahead, gravel cascading by way of the shattered windshield and over the passengers seated within the entrance and center rows. Below the burden of the 10-wheeler Ashok Leyland tipper, steel twisted and collapsed. The bus tipped sideways, half-buried in gravel. Amid waves of mud and screams for assist, these on the again fought to interrupt home windows and crawl out; others had been pinned underneath seats.
By the point rescue groups arrived, the wreckage stretched over 100 metres. Diesel fumes and the odor of scorched rubber hung within the air. Villagers rushed ahead first, pulling individuals out earlier than the police reached. Thirty-eight survivors, many in crucial situation, had been shifted to varied hospitals — the CHC, Vikarabad authorities hospital, and Putnam Mahender Reddy (PMR) hospital.
Wahed’s household was amongst a number of that shattered in seconds. Two younger ladies had been orphaned. Three sisters, on their method to write school exams in Hyderabad after attending their elder sibling’s marriage ceremony, by no means made it.
At PMR hospital, Anuja, an assistant professor on obligation that morning, says she had by no means seen a scene like that in her total stint. “I used to be on night time shift and was speculated to get off work by 9 a.m. However we obtained a name a few mass casualty and had been instructed to anticipate 4-5 injured individuals. The numbers went as much as 14. Over half the beds within the emergency ward needed to be readied. It was a process, however we’re glad that everybody is now steady and brought care of,” the physician provides.
On the CHC morgue in Chevella, deputy civil surgeon Srinivas struggled to carry again tears. “We completed autopsies of all of the 19 our bodies by afternoon and handed them to the households grieving outdoors the morgue. I’ve seen accidents on that stretch, with fatalities reported each two months, however nothing of this scale,” he remembers.
Lethal sample hidden in plain sight
The crash on November 3 was not an aberration; it was solely the newest entry in an extended record of tragedies on this street. Knowledge from the Cyberabad visitors wing reveals that the 42-kilometre stretch between the Telangana State Police Academy and Chittampally Gate on NH-163 has become one of many area’s most accident-prone corridors. Between 2023 and October 2025, a complete of 331 accidents had been recorded right here, claiming 106 lives and injuring greater than 300.
Over the previous 12 months, the Chevella stretch of the Hyderabad-Bijapur freeway has seen crash after crash. On September 14, a 38-year-old man died after a dashing container lorry rammed his bike from behind. On August 25, a 32-year-old man and his teenage daughter had been killed when a dashing cement tanker hit their bike.
Barely three kilometres from the spot the place the RTC bus now lies torn aside, 4 vegetable distributors had been run over at Aloor in December 2024 when a lorry driver making an attempt to overhaul misplaced management and ploughed right into a crowded night market. The car, travelling from Hyderabad to Vikarabad, stopped solely after ramming a tree, trapping the driving force within the cabin.
The numbers reveal a relentless development. In 2023 and 2024, the stretch reported 103 and 104 accidents, respectively. This 12 months has already crossed these figures, with 124 instances recorded until October. Deadly crashes have dipped marginally — from 50 deaths in 2023 to 19 this 12 months — however the general variety of accidents and accidents continues to rise.
The issue extends far past Chevella. Throughout the 47-kilometre stretch of NH-163 between Hyderabad’s Tipu Khan Bridge and Chittampally Gate, there have been 181 accidents this 12 months alone until October, killing 23 individuals and injuring 187. As compared, 2022 noticed 129 accidents, 33 deaths and 136 accidents.
Members of the family of those that died within the accident mourn outdoors a hospital in Chevella.
| Picture Credit score:
PTI
Total, between 2022 and October 2025, the stretch has witnessed 538 accidents, leaving 145 useless and 514 injured.
The dangers have been flagged earlier than. In a 2022 report back to the Ministry of Highway Transport and Highways, Cyberabad Visitors Police recognized 12 black spots alongside the APPA Junction-Manneguda stretch of NH-163 — together with a half-kilometre patch in Chevella, from Emcor Packing Personal Restricted to Al Habeeb Faculty of Engineering & Know-how. Between 2018 and August 2022, that stretch recorded 151 accidents, leading to 34 deaths and 151 accidents.
Inside a 10-kilometre radius of the Mirjaguda crash website, there are greater than a dozen medical amenities, together with two non-public medical faculties (Bhaskara and PMR), the government-run CHC in Chevella and a number of other major well being centres. “There are enough medical amenities on the stretch. The issue is the street alone,” says Dr.Srinivas.
Madhapur Visitors DCP T. Sai Manohar says a devoted patrol car, as a part of a fleet of eight such assigned to nationwide highways underneath Cyberabad limits, screens accident-prone stretches in Chevella.
Engineering flaws, reckless driving
Officers say the crashes on this stretch aren’t random tragedies; they’re engineered into the street.
In response to Manohar, the surge in accidents on this stretch of NH-163 is the results of poor street design, insufficient upkeep and driver behaviour. “The street has a number of sharp curves and drivers have a tendency to hurry to succeed in their vacation spot quicker. That mixture has confirmed lethal,” he says, including that slope variations, structural defects and floor harm have solely worsened security.
Vinod Kanumula, chief functionary of the Indian Highway Federation and a local of Vikarabad who has pushed this route for almost twenty years, says the issues have been identified for years. “That’s my common route, which I even audited in 2017 from APPA Junction to Bijapur. Regardless that funds had been allotted, street enlargement has been endlessly delayed,” he explains.
To him, the hazard begins with the design: “It’s barely huge sufficient for 2 buses to cross. Being an inter-State street connecting Karnataka and Mumbai, it carries heavy industrial visitors, but it stays unsafe. My automobile as soon as overturned due to a steep curve. Apart from Chevella, Manneguda and Moinabad junctions, there aren’t any streetlights and the remaining stays darkish after sunset.”
Manohar notes that visitors on the route has surged in recent times as IT staff, college students and enterprise house owners from Vikarabad, Bijapur and close by cities commute to Hyderabad every single day. “The street was by no means designed to deal with such heavy motion,” he says.
Kanumula says the expansion has been exponential, not incremental. “When you veer off the street, you find yourself in a forest or in sand. Crashed autos are a standard sight. The street has no shoulder marking, no signage or reflectors and no warning for speed-breakers,” he says. What was as soon as a one-hour drive from Vikarabad to Mehdipatnam now takes 45 minutes longer, with mining vehicles and personal autos including to the visitors burden, he provides.
Residents and commuters echo that frustration. “I’ve been seeing accidents on this stretch for years now. Each few weeks, there may be one other crash however nothing ever modifications,” rues Ramana, a Chevella resident.
Overcrowding has added to the chaos. “The free journey scheme for girls has led to a surge in passengers, however not in buses or employees,” says an RTC bus driver who visited PMR hospital, the place Radha — the injured conductor of the ill-fated bus — is being handled. Radha suffered a 10-centimetre reduce on her brow and required 18 stitches. “Throughout rush hours, it’s inconceivable to regulate the group. How can we inform them to not board,” he asks.
However infrastructure alone isn’t accountable. Highway security writer and driver-training coach Naresh Raghavan says design flaws turn out to be deadly when coupled with human error. “The accident occurred on an undivided street. It’s attainable that the driving force had no formal coaching or driving training, which led to a miscalculation that value 19 lives.”
In response to him, overtaking on slender, undivided highways is without doubt one of the most harmful choices a driver could make. “It requires judging the pace of oncoming autos, your individual pace and distance to the impediment in a break up second. A slight error can finish in catastrophe. To stop such tragedies, there needs to be obligatory driver training earlier than issuing licences, particularly for heavy car drivers,” he asserts.
Members of the family of those that died within the accident mourn outdoors the Patnam Mahender Reddy Normal Hospital in Chevella.
| Picture Credit score:
PTI
Providing a reminder typically forgotten in accident statistics, Kanumula says, “Consideration goes solely to the deceased. However what about these injured, who could by no means be capable to work or present for his or her households?”
Satirically, the day of the crash was additionally the day the Nationwide Inexperienced Tribunal issued orders allowing widening of NH-163 between Moinabad in Rangareddy district and Manneguda in Vikarabad.
Overload and error underneath lens
Telangana Director Normal of Police (DGP) B. Shivadhar Reddy, who inspected the crash website a day later, says preliminary findings level to a misjudgment by the lorry driver. “He tried to keep away from a small pothole, swerved barely to the correct and collided with the bus. In any other case, we don’t see any difficulty with the street. The curve is just not sharp, there aren’t any bushes blocking visibility and no different obstructions,” he notes.
Investigators are additionally inspecting if the lorry’s mechanical situation — its engine, braking system and general upkeep — performed a task.
Preliminary inspection suggests the lorry was carrying almost 60 to 70 tonnes of gravel, virtually double its permitted capability. Officers imagine that the extreme load could have intensified the influence of the collision. “We’re verifying the car’s paperwork, the path of transactions and the gravel load taken from Lakdaram in Patancheru earlier than it started its journey in the direction of Manneguda through Shankarpally. The opportunity of overload can’t be dominated out,” an investigating officer says.
Whereas the probe deepens, households shattered by the crash look ahead to readability and accountability.