On the night of October 23, 2025, after holidaying in Hyderabad, Nelakurthy Ramesh, 30, boarded a bus bound for Bengaluru with his wife and two children. Sharing the journey was Ramesh’s extended family — his cousin, cousin’s wife, and their two children. All of them settled into the berths of the sleeper bus, operated by V-Kaveri Travels, a private “luxury bus service” as per its website.

The bus had started its journey from Kukatpally, a suburb in north-western Hyderabad, around 9.40 p.m. The two families boarded the bus at L.B. Stadium, which is about 9 kilometres from Kukatpally. There were 44 passengers and two drivers in the bus, according to the travel agency’s ticket list. Some of the passengers fell asleep in the air-conditioned bus, while others remained glued to their phones, their faces illuminated by the blue glow of screens.

Ramesh recalls what happened hours later. “There was a thud that shook me out of sleep,” he says. “I thought a tyre was punctured and the driver would stop, but he continued to drive.” He checked his phone. It was 3 a.m.

A few seconds later, he noticed thick smoke emanating from the driver’s cabin. “Someone from the back shouted, ‘Fire! Fire!’ We saw flames in the front of the bus,” says Ramesh.

The bus halted in the middle of the road. Ramesh peered into the darkness and saw a median on the right side and bushes on the left. He felt a sense of foreboding. He bolted to the front door to open it, but shrank back as the blaze became bigger.

“I thought all of us were going to die and wanted to escape somehow,” he says.

Ramesh picked up a blunt object and started hitting a window on his left side. Three blows later, the glass pane shattered. Ramesh pushed his two children out and then his wife.

As he did this, he screamed about the fire outbreak to alert his cousin on the upper berth. “By then, thick clouds of black smoke had filled up the whole bus and people were coughing. I wanted to save my cousin and his family but I could not stay in the bus for a second longer,” says Ramesh, crying as he remembers the last few moments in the burning bus before jumping out to save his own life.

Ramesh’s extended family of four were among the 19 passengers who died in the tragedy that took place near Chinnatekuru village of Kallur mandal in the Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh. Several others were injured.

Charred remains

That night, Harish, a techie from Hyderabad, was also heading to Bengaluru in a car with his friends. As the car came close to the standing bus near Chinnatekur, Harish noticed a body lying on the left side of the road. “I first thought a passenger had fallen off the bus. I went closer and realised that the bus had caught fire,” he says.

Harish stepped out of the car and ran towards the bus. He picked up a boulder and threw it at the vehicle, breaking a window pane. “People were screaming. I saw a woman holding a child on her lap. There were flames all around her. She gestured to me frantically for help but I was unable to do anything. Some people jumped out through the broken window,” he says.

Harish says he could not see the driver anywhere. “It was pitch dark. It was also raining, so we couldn’t see much,” he says.

At about 3.20 a.m., the Kurnool police received a call from a communications professional, Hyma Reddy, who had seen the burning bus from her car from across the divider. The person who attended the call — an officer of the Special Branch — alerted the Inspector of the Ulindakonda police station, about 7 km from the accident spot, after confirming the location with Reddy.

Family members grieve the death of a loved one in the accident.
| Photo Credit:
Nagara Gopal

The police rushed to the spot with their teams, recalls Reddy. Firefighters and ambulances also arrived around the same time. They doused the fire and found several charred bodies inside. The police moved the bodies to the Kurnool government hospital for DNA finger printing tests to establish the identities of the dead.

The police also found skid marks on the road 200 metres away from the spot, a bike stuck underneath the bus, burnt sealed boxes of mobile phones inside one of the luggage cabins, and bare front wheels without traces of tyres. These findings, they say, triggered multiple theories about how the bus had caught fire.

The police also found the body of a young man about 200 metres from the bus. They wondered if there had been a head-on collision between the bike and the bus. As they discussed theories and gathered evidence at the spot, the second driver of the bus, Shivanarayana, turned up before the police three hours later.

According to Kurnool Deputy Inspector General of Police, Koya Praveen, Shivanarayana told the police that a man called M. Laxmaiah was driving the bus when he ran over a bike that was “already lying on the road”. Laxmaiah panicked. “As the bike got stuck underneath the bus between the two front wheels, it got dragged for nearly 200 metres. This triggered sparks,” says Praveen, who interrogated Shivanarayana. “The flames started spreading quickly. Laxmaiah woke up Shivanarayana, who began breaking window panes with a rod. Laxmaiah fled the scene.”

Ramesh, however, wrote in his complaint, which was accessed by The Hindu, that the bus rammed into the bike “from behind”, instantly killing the bike rider. He says this is what ignited the fire.

Bodies of victims being taken away from the site of the accident.
| Photo Credit:
Nagara Gopal

A night of revelry and tragedy

After special teams circulated pictures of the dead man on the road and examined video footage from surveillance cameras on the route to the accident spot, the police identified him as Shivashankar, a tile worker from Prajanagar in Kurnool town. The police made inquiries and found that he had returned home on the evening of October 23 from work.

According to an Inspector associated with the investigation of the case, special teams picked up four people with whom Shivashankar had worked that day. One of them admitted that he had transferred ₹100 online to Shivashankar after midnight. The co-worker said he had asked Shivashankar why he needed money in the middle of night and Shivashankar had told him that he was taking his friend to Dhone, a town in Nandyal district. Shivashankar sent his co-worker a selfie of him and his friend.

Meanwhile, investigators found a video clip of Shivashankar getting his bike filled with petrol at a bunk minutes before the accident. They saw a young man riding pillion. When the police sent the image to the co-worker, he confirmed that the young man was the same person in the selfie with Shivashankar. But where had he gone?

Without access to the phone, the police relied on signal tracking and pinpointed Shivashankar’s mobile to Tuggali, an area about 90 km from Kurnool. They rushed there and found that the phone was with a young man, Erni Swamy alias Nani, who had accompanied Shivashankar.

Nani admitted that he and Shivashankar had been drinking the night of October 23 at his house in Laxmipuram, about 12 km from Chinnatekur. After getting heavily drunk, they had fallen asleep. “At around 1 a.m. Nani woke up and told Shivashankar that he had missed a wedding at Dhone. Shivashankar said he would drop Nani at Dhone,” says an investigator who spoke to Nani.

“Nani says Shivashankar, who was speeding on the road, rammed into a roadside railing. Nani was flung off the bike because of the impact and he landed in some bushes with minor scratches. He walked up to the bike and found his friend dead. He managed to pull the body to the side. He tried to drag the bike lying in the middle of the road to the side as well, but it was too heavy for him,” the investigator says.

Minutes later, a bus hit the bike. A few more passed by. Then the sleeper bus ran over the bike and dragged it for about 200 m, explains the investigator. “Nani saw from a distance that the bus had caught fire and heard screams for help. Scared, he stayed rooted at the spot,” he says. After some time, Nani got into a tractor and went to Tuggali, he explains.

Changing structure

The sleeper coach bus was originally registered as a 53-seater bus with the Medchal Malkajgiri Road Transport Office on August 8, 2018. When the original owner decided to sell it, the V-Kaveri Travels management purchased it, explains Raghunandan Goud, Road Transport Officer from Medchal Malkajgiri district.

“Eventually, the new owner got it re-registered in Daman and Diu on March 31, 2023, reportedly after converting it into a sleeper coach. They secured a ‘fitness certificate’ from there. Later, the bus was once again re-registered with the Odisha government on September 20. The bus was yet to get the new registration number from Odisha,” says Goud.

The investigators are verifying whether the law permits transport agencies to convert seater buses into sleeper coaches. Even if approvals are secured, changes in seating patterns can compromise safety measures, they explain.

Officials who inspected the bus say the original structure had been modified. The quality of the leather, the seat covers, curtains, plywood and other materials were all of cheap quality, which, they believe, caused the fire to spread rapidly.

Forensic personnel and police investigate the accident site.
| Photo Credit:
Nagara Gopal

Zuber Ali Khan, a Hyderabad-based fire and forensic engineer, who examined the accident spot, says each accident is unique. “In this case, some of the passengers may have choked to death or fallen unconscious before getting burnt. This is because the smoke that emanated from the inflammable material used for the seats and berths was highly toxic,” he says.

Jayant Kushwaha, 27, frequently travels between Hyderabad and Bengaluru. He says he has used the same bus service many times. “Maybe the bus was old. It looked old,” he says. “The emergency window, the driver’s cabin, everything was jammed.”

No lessons learnt

In 2013, a private bus heading towards Hyderabad from Bengaluru caught fire. Forty-five people, including a pregnant woman, died in the incident, which also occurred on NH 44 in October.

After that incident, say several police officers, people suggested that video and audio announcements be made before the start of every journey about exits and entry points, emergency doors, and the location of hammers. These suggestions were submitted to the State and the Central governments. However, many survivors of the Kurnool bus accident say they did not know about emergency doors or hammers.

The Andhra Pradesh Disaster Response and Fire Services Department and the Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory (APFSL) are conducting separate inquiries to ascertain the cause of the fire and of how it spread.

The Director General in charge, Andhra Pradesh Disaster Response and Fire Services, P. Venkata Ramana, says the travel bus was not run according to safety norms. “All the fire safety norms were violated,” he says. “There were no hammers to break the window panes and there was no second exit (emergency exit), which is mandatory.” There was one fire extinguisher, which was supposed to be used by the driver. “But he fled.”

APFSL is conducting tests of the samples collected from the bus. “As of now, we have conducted DNA sampling of the deceased and sent the reports to the police,” says G. Palaraju, Director of APFSL. Palaraju says there were nearly 100 mobile phones in the cabin. “Their batteries seem to have exploded as the fire spread,” he says. The battery in the bus also exploded, he adds.

Palaraju says teams have collected 83 samples including burnt luggage, seat covers, damaged cell phones, doors, melted wind shields, and other objects for verification. “Carrying mobile phones in the luggage cabin is a violation of norms,” he says. He adds that since the AC was on at the time of the accident, oxygen levels were high in the sleeper coach, which caused the flames to spread rapidly.

Forensic personnel and police at the accident site.
| Photo Credit:
Nagara Gopal

The news of the bus accident has shattered the lives of Srinivas Reddy and Vijitha Reddy of Vasthakonduru village in Yadadri district of Telangana. Their daughter, Anusha Reddy, a techie working in Bengaluru, had come home for Deepavali and had left on the evening of October 23.

“She called us around 9.30 p.m. saying she had just boarded the bus,” recalls an inconsolable Srinivas Reddy. “She told me she would call on reaching Bengaluru. All we got was a call from the police telling us that she had died.”

This story was edited by Radhika Santhanam