(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Five members of a family, including three children, were killed when their car plunged into a roadside farm well on a highway near Morbi town in Gujarat in the wee hours of Monday.
While lawyer Sanjay Jhala (38), who was at the wheel, and his teen-aged niece were injured but had a miraculous escape, his wife, 42-year-old sister-in-law and three minor kids - his son, daughter and another niece - drowned in the 25-feet-deep well before help could reach them.
According to the police, the accident occurred when Jhala, who was heading home with six family members after attending a late-night wedding function in a nearby village, lost control after being blinded by the headlights of a vehicle coming from the opposite direction.
The injured 17-year-old niece managed to come out of the well through the broken windscreen and stopped passing truck drivers who pulled out bleeding Jhala still gasping for breath but by the time the firemen and police officers arrived, five others had a watery grave.
On Tuesday, lawyers of Morbi abstained from work to mourn the death of Jhala's wife, kids and two other relatives in the highway accident.
In Gujarat, which records one death in every fourth road mishap, 7,000 people died in 30,000 road accidents in 2013. The parliament was told recently that road mishaps claimed 360 lives every day in India, 10 per cent of the global total.
Government data shows that each year about 120,000 people are killed in road crashes caused by reckless driving, bad roads or the poor condition of vehicles.
Indians, indeed, are 20 times as likely to die in a road accident as residents of a developed country. About 35 per cent of all accidental deaths in India take place on the roads. In India, 130,000 people die in road mishaps every year, and Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad, accounting for two million vehicles, registers 50 major accidents daily.
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