At Least 26 Killed as a Minibus and a Container Truck Collide Head-On Beside Kaziranga

Folks, the death toll was reported five times on Friday, from seven to twenty-six, and not one of those numbers was withdrawn before the next one landed.

At Least 26 Killed as a Minibus and a Container Truck Collide Head-On Beside Kaziranga

Kaziranga, Assam — The collision happened at Rangajan, near the Hathikuli tea estate in the Kohora range of Golaghat district, on National Highway 715 at roughly 3:15 on Friday afternoon. Most of the passengers were young. Several were college students on their way home from class.

The Toll Rose All Evening

The first number was seven. Golaghat's senior superintendent of police, Swapnaneel Deka, told the Press Trust of India that a preliminary report put the figure there and warned it would rise, because bodies were still being pulled from the wreckage. It rose. By late afternoon the district administration confirmed twelve. Then Assam's panchayat and rural development minister, Atul Bora, who is also the local MLA, told reporters on the ground that twenty-three people had died, some of them at the scene. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, speaking at an official function in Biswanath, said the latest update he had received was twenty-four, and that college students were among them. By ten o'clock on Friday night, a senior doctor at Kohora Model Hospital put it at twenty-six. "The total number of dead in the accident has increased to 26. Ambulances have taken the people to different hospitals, and we are collecting the data from them," Dr Dipam Kumar Barman said. The district executive magistrate had already put the earlier count on the record. "The death toll is rising very fast. As per the latest information, doctors have confirmed that 23 people have died in the accident. The identities of the dead are being ascertained now," the magistrate said. The injured count moved too: Khaleej Times reported twelve, the Mirror eleven, and later reports twenty.

What the Police Say Happened

The minibus was a Traveller, a stretched utility van that is the workhorse of Indian short-haul passenger transport, registered as AS02AC6690. The container truck carried the plate KA01AT0977. Police say the minibus was travelling from Golaghat towards Nagaon while the truck was heading into Upper Assam. Deka's account, repeated by district officials through the afternoon, is that the van was running at a very high speed in violation of the restrictions in force beside the national park, that its driver lost control, and that it then hit the truck. The front of the vehicle was crushed into a heap of metal. The truck skidded off the carriageway. The district administration says a thorough inquiry will be instituted into whether either vehicle broke traffic norms — carrying more passengers than its seating capacity, or exceeding the speed limit.

The Truck Driver's Account

The truck driver, who survived with minor injuries along with one other person in the cab, gave reporters a different sequence. "I was en route to Dibrugarh from Tezpur. The Traveller directly hit our vehicle." A purported video from the truck's dash camera, which went viral, was described by the Press Trust of India as appearing to show the minibus approaching rapidly, jumping its lane and striking the truck's front. That footage has not been authenticated by investigators, and police have not adopted the driver's account as their official finding. Differing accounts in the first hours are normal on an Indian highway, and they are precisely what the inquiry is meant to settle.

A Minibus With a Record

What the Golaghat district transport office says about the van is harder to argue with. According to an official there, the minibus was registered in the name of Anjir Ali of Nagaon and had been fined four thousand rupees in Jorhat on 3 March for being driven at 102 kilometres an hour. It had also collected multiple overspeeding penalties on the Kaziranga stretch, and several of those fines were still outstanding. That detail matters more than any single statement made at the crash site. A vehicle with an active record of speeding on the exact corridor where police suspect speeding killed twenty-six people was still carrying passengers on that corridor on Friday afternoon. Nothing in the public record yet explains why the paperwork did not translate into a stopped vehicle.

The Passengers

Officials have identified fourteen of the dead: Jyoti Majhi, Darpana Majhi, Anurag Goala, Abdul Mujid, Subhash, Rashid Ali, Hafiza Khatun, Farhana Yasmin, K R Lobho, Amjad Ali, Bulbul Ali, Baby Karmakar, Damini Ghatowar and Dipanjali Rongphar. Anurag Goala was twelve years old. Abdul Mujid was driving the minibus; Subhash was its handyman. Two women are among the dead, and officials say minors are among them. Even the headcount is unsettled: the Sentinel reported around thirty-five aboard, the Times of India said forty, and Deka told PTI the exact figure was not immediately known but was estimated at about forty-five. The state has not published a seating capacity for the van, which is the number that would settle whether this was also an overloading case.

Nine Ambulances and Two Hospitals

The injured went first to Kohora Model Hospital, a small facility minutes from the tea estate. Nine ambulances ran continuously, and twenty people were referred onward to Jorhat for advanced treatment, with the critically hurt also taken to civil hospitals at Bokakhat and Golaghat and to Jorhat Medical College and Hospital. Bora said he was visiting the hospitals to assess the injured and review their care. Postmortems will be conducted at Swahid Kushal Konwar Civil Hospital in Golaghat during daylight on Saturday, on the chief minister's instruction, after an earlier official had said the autopsies might be done overnight. That change is small and it is also the humane one: identifications in a crash of this kind take faces, and faces take light. Bora, visiting the wards, said he had issued instructions that every injured person receive the best treatment available. Senior civil and police officials had reached the spot to help rescue the passengers.

The Road That Cuts Through the Park

National Highway 715 runs for sixty-four kilometres between Bokakhat and Ghorakati, and for much of that distance it slices through Kaziranga, a UNESCO World Heritage site holding roughly 2,613 one-horned rhinos at the last census. The park is pinched between the Brahmaputra and the Karbi Anglong hills, which is why animals cross the highway at all. A Gauhati University survey that logged 144 road trips on the stretch found 6,036 animals of 53 species killed by vehicles across 2016 and 2017, with 63.6 per cent of those deaths falling in the flood season between April and September, when wildlife flees to the hills. The forest department responded with a forty-kilometre-an-hour limit and animal-sensor cameras. A thirty-five-kilometre elevated corridor has been planned to carry the traffic above the crossings.

A National Ledger of Road Deaths

Friday's crash is not an aberration in the Indian data. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways told Parliament in December that 1,77,177 people died on the country's roads in calendar year 2024. Its state table records 3,351 deaths in Assam that year, against 2,629 in 2020 — a rise of more than a quarter in four years. The ministry has also told the House, citing World Road Statistics, that India accounts for the highest number of road-accident fatalities of any country, at a rate of 11.89 deaths per lakh of population, against 4.3 in China and 12.76 in the United States. India signed the Stockholm Declaration in 2020, committing to halve road deaths by 2030. The ministry has told Parliament that remedial measures have been completed at 5,773 identified blackspots, and that road-safety audits are now mandatory on every national highway at design, construction, operation and maintenance stages. Assam alone records roughly 7,000 crashes and about 3,000 deaths in an average year, according to the ministry's reporting.

What the State Has Promised

"The scale of this loss has shaken all of us, and my heart goes out to every family that has lost a loved one. No words can ease their pain, but I want them to know that they are not alone. All of Assam stands with them in this hour of grief," Sarma wrote. He said the immediate priority was to ensure that the injured received the best possible medical care without delay, directed education minister Ranoj Pegu to visit Kohora, and said he would go himself on Saturday. President Droupadi Murmu, Vice-President C P Radhakrishnan, Home Minister Amit Shah and Governor Lakshman Prasad Acharya all condoled. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced two lakh rupees to the family of each person killed and fifty thousand to each of the injured from the national relief fund.

What the Inquiry Has to Answer

Money does not close a question. Four remain open. How many people were actually inside a van whose seating capacity has never been published? Was the forty-kilometre limit beside the park being enforced at all, and by whom? Why did a vehicle with a documented overspeeding record on this exact stretch keep operating, and what happened to the penalties the transport office says were still pending? And what is the calendar for the elevated corridor, which has been planned for years and has saved no one yet. Two of those answers sit in the Golaghat district transport office's own file. The third sits with the forest department and the highway police. The dash-camera footage will help establish what the minibus driver did in the final seconds. It will not explain why the road through Kaziranga is still a place where a passenger van and a container truck can meet head-on at speed, in the shadow of a national park, on a Friday afternoon.

Fourteen of the dead have names. The rest do not, not yet, and the question of how many people were in that van still has three different answers. That is where an inquiry should start.

By Jessica Ali, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: Press Trust of India, The Hindu, National Herald, The New Indian Express, The Sentinel, Times of India, Business Standard, Siasat Daily, Khaleej Times, Deccan Herald, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha replies, December 2025). Cover: Global 1 News editorial image. Photographs: PTI via The New Indian Express; The Hindu; Horshadeep Saikia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).