“If I had not missed my bus, I would not have encountered this accident,” said Varun, a 25-year-old software engineer working in Bengaluru, who narrowly escaped death after a container truck rammed into a luxury sleeper bus on National Highway 48 in Hiriyur taluk of Karnataka’s Chitradurga district in the early hours of Thursday.
Mr. Varun told The Hindu that he had been waiting at Goraguntepalya after missing his scheduled bus when the sleeper bus arrived about 15 minutes later. As he was travelling only up to Chitradurga, he asked the conductor for a seat and was told that an upper berth at the rear of the bus was available.
Recounting the moments before the crash that took six lives, Mr. Varun said that exactly at 2.01 a.m., his mobile phone abruptly lost network connectivity, following which the emergency SOS feature on his phone was triggered due to sudden impact. Mr. Varun was occupying an upper-right berth when the container truck hit the bus.
“I jumped down, broke the window and managed to pull another passenger out,” he said. “Within 40 seconds, everything was burning. Nothing was visible. Thick smoke engulfed the bus, and we could not make out if people were still inside or even where to run,” he said.
