As many as 13 children have been killed and seven others injured after a speeding train hit their school van at an unmanned crossing in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh Thursday, officials said.
The accident occurred this morning at Dudhi railway crossing in Kushinagar, over 320 km from state capital Lucknow. “The school van was carrying 25 students of Divine Public School. A passenger train crashed into the vehicle after it got stalled on the tracks at the unmanned railway crossing. Some 13 children were killed on the spot,” a railway official said. “The death toll may go up later in the day as the condition of some of the injured are said to be serious in a government hospital where they were rushed to by locals after the accident. All the injured are being given the best treatment available,” he added. Local TV channels showed footage of the mangled remains of the yellow school van lying on the side of the railway tracks and reported that most of the victims were aged below 10 years old.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who rushed to the spot later in the day along with senior officials, attributed the accident to “sheer negligence” of the school van driver who, he said, ignored the warnings of a railway gateman. “Preliminary probe has indicated that the school van driver got to the tracks despite being warned of the impending danger of an approaching train. He simply didn’t pay any heed, he had earphones on, this is a case of pure negligence,” he told the media. Indian President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have expressed their condolences to the families of those killed in the accident. Modi said that he was “extremely saddened” by the report of the accident.
The Indian Railways and the state government have both ordered a compensation of 200,000 rupees (3,500 U.S. dollars) to the families of each of the deceased. Indian Railways Minister Piyush Goyal has also ordered a high-level investigation into the accident. The Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest train networks, criss-crossing the country from north to south. It operates some 9,000 passenger trains and carries nearly 23 million passengers every day. But train disasters are quite common in India as much of its colonial-era infrastructure is out of date and a number of railway crossings are unmanned.
