School bus driver using bamboo stick as gear hits car, held
Mumbai, Feb 7: A 22-year-old driver, who was operating a bus using a bamboo stick as gear lever, was arrested after his vehicle carrying school students hit a car in Mumbai, a police official said on Thursday.
No injury or casualty was reported in the mishap.
Raj Kumar was driving the bus to Podar International School located in Khar suburb on Wednesday when the vehicle hit the high-end car of a businessman, the official said.
The angry businessman then confronted the driver for causing damage to his car.
When two policemen arrived at the spot, Kumar blamed the steering wheel of his bus for the mishap, he said.
The car owner and the policemen then went inside the bus and they were shocked to see the bamboo stick in place of the gear lever, he said.
Kumar, who was subsequently arrested for negligent driving, told the police that the bus gear knob had broken some days back and since then he was using the bamboo stick as gear lever, the official said.
"All the students inside the bus were safe," he said.
The driver was later produced in a local court which granted him bail, he said, adding that a probe was underway into the incident.
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ECI website faces outage amid vote counting in Jharkhand, Maharashtra
New Delhi: Election Commission of India’s official results website ‘results.eci.gov.in’ has reportedly experienced a technical outage on Saturday morning, at a time when India closely watches the high-stakes Maharashtra and Jharkhand assembly poll battle.
Visitors visiting the site were met with non-functional links and a generic “counting in progress” message, leaving them without updated election data. The ECI has not issued an official explanation for the disruption.
Vote counting, which began at 8 a.m. with postal ballots, is underway for 288 assembly seats in Maharashtra and 81 in Jharkhand. Early trends suggest a lead for the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance in Maharashtra, currently ahead in 141 seats, while the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) is leading in 96. In Jharkhand, the BJP-led NDA is ahead in 43 seats, while the ruling JMM-led alliance is trailing with leads in 33 constituencies.
Additionally, counting is underway for 48 assembly bypolls across 13 states and two parliamentary seats, Nanded in Maharashtra and Wayanad in Kerala.
