Kolkata: Passenger’s hand ripped off as bus grazes pillar

KOLKATA: A 46-year-old man standing on the footboard of a bus had his left arm ripped off after it got caught in a building pillar as the bus negotiated a narrow, congested road near the Karunamayee Kali Mandir, off Tollygunge, on Thursday morning.
Utpal Karmakar was ferried to M R Bangur Hospital in a taxi — with two police constables carrying the severed arm in a plastic bag — within 10 minutes of the accident but doctors ruled out any attempt to reattach the torn arm. “The arm was damaged so badly that there was no way it could be reattached. We also found out that Karmakar was a diabetic, which made things more complicated. So we had to amputate the arm,” M R Bangur Hospital superintendent Asim Halder said. The hospital does not have any facility to conduct vascular surgeries that need to be done to reattach severed limbs. But officials said doctors spoke to SSKM Hospital plastic surgeons before taking the amputation call.

The incident occurred around 9.15am, moments after the bus on route S4C left the Haridevpur stand and headed towards Karunamayee. Karmakar, a resident of Naskarpara Road in Haridevpur, was among the last passengers to board the crowded bus and could manage only a foothold even as two of his relatives jostled their way inside.
The accident happened around 800 metres after the bus left the depot as the driver accelerated so that he could cross the Karunamayee intersection before the traffic signal turned red. The section is so narrow that vehicles travelling in opposite directions often scrape each other.
Karmakar’s bus did not scrape any vehicle on its right but, instead, came close to grazing a building on its left; it was at this time that Karmakar’s left hand got wedged between the bus and a roadside building’s pillar and got ripped off as the bus lurched forward.
“I spotted a pillar and pushed inward but my bag, slung on my left shoulder, got caught between the bus and the pillar. My arm was automatically pulled back and, before I could react, it was ripped off,” Karmakar later told doctors.
Piu Shyamal, owner of the house in front of which the accident took place, rushed down on hearing the commotion. “ I fould Karmakar sitting in a daze with blood everywhere. I tried to check where the injury was and found a portion of his arm lying beside him. It had been completely torn off near the elbow,” Shyamal said.
Another witness, florist Hari Pal, said a sergeant called a taxi and rushed Karmakar to M R Bangur Hospital as two constables and Karmakar’s sister-in-followed — with the severed arm — in an auto-rickshaw. The driver of the bus, meanwhile, fled the spot.
Cops later launched a special drive, asking passengers to get off buses that were overcrowded. “This is a question of life and death and passengers must realise that footboards are not meant for travelling,” said an officer at Lalbazar.