JAGTIAL: It has been over a month since an overloaded bus slipped into a gorge in Kondagattu killing over 50 people and injuring many. On the day of accident, September 11, Telangana’s IT minister KT Rama Rao and Finance Minister Etela Rajender promised to give Rs 5 lakh to each victim’s family. The families of the victims still await the ex-gratia payments promised to them to help with the mounting medical bills continue to threaten the recovery of the victims.
On Sunday, one of the injured in the ghat road accident, Arepalli Lingavva (70) succumbed to his injuries in a hospital in Karimnagar. Victims have been complaining that they are unable to meet the medical expenses of their treatments causing the hospitals to discharge them without complete recovery.
A victim whose spinal cord was fractured in the accident has been asked by the doctors to undergo a check up every 10 days. Victim’s mother, Kalpana, lamented that her daughter could not travel without an ambulance because of the injured spine while the expenses of using the ambulance service is high up at Rs 4,000. Golakonda’s Vijaya is still in a hospital in Hyderabad with multiple fractures while the hospital management has threatened to discharge her for not paying the bills. One of the victims, Anil, was visiting from Dubai and cannot return back due to injuries sustained in the accident.
Meanwhile, Loksatta Udyama Samstha (LUS) president N Srinivas wrote a letter to the prime minister Narendra Modi, who recently announced a relief amount of Rs 2 lakh for the families of the victims of the Ramban bus accident in Jammu and Kashmir where a mini bus fell into a gorge killing nearly 20 persons, requesting for a similar relief to the Kondagattu bus victims. In his letter, the LUS president alleged that the Kondagattu ghat road accident was the one of the worst in the country and requested for immediate aid.