Six dead as car overturns on Maharashtra's Samriddhi Expressway

Two children, one of them a four-month-old, three women and a man died in a road accident Sunday morning as a speeding car overturned on the Samriddhi Highway, which, the local public in Maharashtra says, has become accident-prone mainly due to overspeeding after the mahamarg was thrown open to people recently.

Buldhana (Maharashtra): Six people, two of them children, died in a road accident as a speeding car with nine passengers on board overturned at the recently inaugurated Samriddhi Highway. One of the children is only four months old. The accident took place on Sunday morning between 7:30 am and 8 am. The car was en route from Aurangabad to Shegaon. The deceased included two children and three women.

Four others were seriously injured in the accident. The police and ambulance reached the spot as soon as they received information about the accident. The injured are presently undergoing treatment at Mehkar hospital. The Maruti Ertiga car has been completely damaged in the accident. The newly inaugurated Samriddhi highway has been prone to accidents, the local public said. Many have said that vehicles are not abiding by speed limits on the highway.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Expressway in December last year. The highway connects Nagpur to Shirdi, while the remaining stretch will be finished in the next six months. The 'Hindu Hrudaysamrat Balasaheb Thackeray Maharashtra Samruddhi Mahamarg' is a six-lane access-controlled highway. It is the second expressway in the state after Mumbai-Pune Expressway.

In an earlier accident in January, four people died after a car collided with a bus on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway in the Dahanu area of the Palghar district of Maharashtra. The Palghar police said that the accident took place on the Mahalakshmi bridge on the Mumbai Ahmedabad highway at around 5 o'clock in the morning. The driver of the car, which was on the way from Gujarat to Mumbai, lost control of the vehicle and hit the luxury bus coming from the opposite direction. All four travelling in the car were killed on the spot.