Jammu, Oct 29 (IANS ) At least 26 students of a nursing college were injured on Tuesday in a road accident in Jammu and Kashmir’s Udhampur district.
Officials said that a bus carrying the students of a nursing college went out of the driver’s control in the Magjote area of the district.
“The bus skidded after the driver lost control of the wheel following which it overturned injuring 26 nursing students. All the injured were shifted to the government medical college (GMC) hospital in Udhampur town. Attending doctors said that two of the injured had sustained critical injuries,” police said.
All the injured students belong to Kashmir Valley.
In another accident in Kangan tehsil of Ganderbal district, a car met with a road accident in which three occupants were injured, one of them critically.
All the injured were shifted to a sub-district hospital in Kangan where doctors said one of the injured was in a highly critical position.
Over-speeding, over-loading and reckless driving are the main causes of accidents on highways and other roads in the union territory.
Another main reason for accidents involving youth in Jammu and Kashmir is rash and negligent two-wheeler driving. Often those youth driving motorcycles are seen doing stunts on the roads or over-speeding to the maximum speed limit of the motorcycle.
“Such youths are always injured sometimes leading to fatalities as they overlook wearing crash helmets and other mandatory traffic precautions. Parents are generally very lenient and casual about rash driving by their children. This creates an unhealthy trend among the youth with all of them competing to overtake cars, trucks, buses and bikes on the roads,” said a senior traffic police official.
Traffic department is taking reformative and punitive action to discourage rash and negligent driving. Authorities have also advised petrol filling stations in the UT not to sell petrol to motorcycle drivers if they are not wearing crash helmets.