10 killed as car falls into gorge in Uttarakhand: Police

Ten people were killed after the vehicle they were travelling in fell into a 500-metre-deep gorge in Uttarakhand’s Pithoragarh district on Thursday, an official said.

The accident occurred around 7.30 am when the 10 people were heading to a temple in Hokara town in a Mahindra Bolero car, an official from the Uttarakhand State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) said.

All 10 bodies have been recovered, Lalita Negi, SDRF media in-charge, said. “In the morning, the local SDRF unit was informed by District Control Room Pithoragarh that a vehicle has fallen into a gorge near Hokara, around 100 km from Pithoragarh town. Immediately, an SDRF rescue team from Askot and another from Kapkot were rushed to the accident site,” Negi said.

The deceased, all of them from Shama village in Bageshwar district, were on their way to Kokila Devi temple in Hokara, the official said.

As the terrain was very steep, the rescue teams had a tough time spotting the bodies and retrieving them, Negi said. “The rescue teams recovered all 10 bodies by 3 pm with the help of local people and handed them to the police,” she added.

The deceased included a couple Nisha Singh (24) and Ummed Singh (28). The others were identified as Kishan Singh (65), Dharma Singh (69), Kundan Singh (58), Shankar Singh (40), Sundar Singh (37), Khushal Singh (64), Dhan Singh (52) and the driver of the vehicle Mahesh Singh (40).

Sundar Singh, a resident of Hokara village, said heavy rainfall on Wednesday night led to debris falling down and eating into the road space. “The vehicle might have lost control as the width of the road had narrowed due to debris,” Singh said.

Meanwhile, chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami expressed grief over the loss of lives in the accident. “Very sad news has been received about the casualties of many people due to the accident of a vehicle coming from Shama in Bageshwar towards Nachni in Pithoragarh,” he said in a tweet.

Last year, 1,042 people were killed in a total of 1,674 road accidents in Uttarakhand, with an accident severity of 62.24%. Accident severity denotes the number of people killed every 100 road mishaps. In 2021, 820 people were killed in 1,405 accidents at an accident severity of 59.94%.

Increasing vehicular traffic, especially in hilly areas, has often been cited as one of the reasons for rise in road accidents in the state. When Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh in November 2000, the state had around 400,000 registered four-wheelers. It now has over 3.2 million vehicles, according to the RTO data.