A five-year-old girl on her way to school was run over by a private bus on Tuesday morning after her mother accidentally let go of her hand while crossing Jessore Road near Nagerbazar after alighting from the same vehicle.

An eyewitness said the driver possibly saw the woman going across the front of the vehicle but missed little Anushka Kar, who was walking behind her mother Sushmita. The bus moved as soon as Sushmita was past the driver’s view.

“The child was just a few steps behind her mother and the driver could not see her head. The bus knocked her down and she was dragged under the vehicle. The child’s mother fainted at the sight of her daughter being crushed by a wheel,” said a tea-stall owner who saw the tragedy unfold around 200 metres from the Nagerbazar crossing on Jessore Road.

Anushka, a student of Christ Church Girls’ High School in Dum Dum, was declared dead on arrival at a nearby private hospital.

As news of the child’s death spread, around 50-odd parents and guardians of schoolchildren put up a roadblock on Jessore Road that paralysed traffic for four hours. Both airport and city-bound traffic through Jessore Road was at a standstill from around 10.30am till 2.30pm, police said.

The protesters demanded a revamp of the traffic signalling system at the intersection of the road that leads to the school and police deployment on that stretch for the duration of school hours.

Some guardians also staged a demonstration on the school campus, accusing the authorities of not taking the initiative to ask the police to deploy personnel near the Clive House bus stop during school hours.

A man walks on the road along the pavement near the Clive House bus stop. A crater has been created by a missing slab. Pradip Sanyal

A heap of garbage has made the pavement inaccessible to pedestrians. Pradip Sanyal

The Telegraph

“We had requested the school authorities several times to communicate with the local police station and get cops or civic volunteers deployed to help students cross Jessore Road. But no initiative was taken. Had there been a single cop at the crossing, a child’s life could have been saved,” said Shyamal Dey, one of the protesters.

Sushmita and Anushka had boarded the bus on Route 223 at Kalindi in Lake Town. They had left home as usual around 9.30am. The accident occurred around 10.10am at the Clive House bus stop opposite Anushka’s school.

Biswajit Saha, an eyewitness to the accident, said Sushmita got off the New Barrackpore-Park Circus bus first and helped her daughter alight before walking towards the front of the vehicle. “The woman let go of her daughter’s hand as they were about to go over to the other side. There was nobody else waiting to cross the road. The woman had crossed the airport-bound flank under the Nagerbazar flyover when the bus started rolling, knocking down her daughter. Some of us screamed and the driver braked, but it was too late.”

When he realised that a fatal accident had occurred, the bus driver jumped out and fled.

Hundreds of children cross Jessore Road at the Clive House bus stop in Nagerbazar every morning and afternoon. That stretch does not have a zebra crossing, a usable footpath or a traffic signal.

The terminus for buses on Route 219 is located on the Nagerbazar-bound flank of the road, whose original width has shrunk by almost the width of a lane. When school gives over, buses compete to pick up students and guardians as quickly as possible, leading to dangerous driving.

The body of Anushka, the daughter of a grocery shop owner from Pragatipally in Kalindi, was taken to the College of Medicine and Sagore Dutta Hospital at Kamarhati for post-mortem. “The bereaved parents had to be given sedatives. Anushka’s father Debabrata wasn’t told about the death of his daughter until much later. He has a cardiac ailment,” a neighbour of the Kar family said.