India opera troupe bus crash kills 25: media

New Delhi: A bus carrying artists of an opera troupe plunged 76 metres (250 feet) into a gorge in eastern India Sunday, killing at least 25 people, media reports said.

The accident happened when the driver of the vehicle carrying around 40 members of the troupe, including women and children, tried to negotiate a sharp turn in the state of Odisha, the Press Trust of India said.

The bus was returning from Deogarh district to Bargarh, PTI said, adding that 11 people were also critically injured.

"Twenty-five bodies have so far been recovered and 11 injured persons, who are in a critical condition, rescued from the mishap site," it quoted Sarah Sharma, Deogarh's superintendent of police as saying.

She said firefighters and police had launched a rescue operation and that some of the injured had been rushed to Deogarh hospital for treatment.

Generators were being used to facilitate rescue operations in the dark, but hilly terrain, dense forest and low visibility were impeding rescue efforts, the SP said.

Fatal traffic accidents are common in India, which has some of the world's deadliest roads with more than 200,000 fatalities annually, according to the World Health Organization.

A packed passenger bus plunged off a bridge into a river in western India in February killing at least 37 people in one of the deadliest road accidents in recent years.

In October, 15 members of a wedding party, including three children, were killed when a vehicle they were travelling in collided with a bus in the south of the country.