The last remnants of the bus being fished out of the canal. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

Calcutta, April 5: The driver at the killer wheel of bus no. 217B was arrested tonight.

Swapan Sarkar, 42, who had jumped off before the bus fell into the Lower Bagjola Canal on VIP Road yesterday, was picked up from a hideout near his home in Dum Dum.

He has been charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder, a non-bailable offence that can attract a 10-year jail term.

Police said they had got his address from the bus union’s office. “We went to his house but did not find him there. We got hold of another bus driver in the neighbourhood and he tipped us off about Swapan’s hideout,” an officer said.

North 24-Parganas superintendent of police Supratim Sarkar said officers from Baguiati police station then raided the hideout in Mullickpara Lane. “He had been holed up there since last night,” he said.

Chittaranjan Basak, a cycle mechanic who was among the first to dive into the water to rescue the trapped passengers, said that when he swam to the bus, the driver’s cabin was empty. “There was no one inside the cabin and the door next to the driver’s seat was open,” Basak said today.

According to Paresh Roy, the officer-in-charge of Baguiati police station who led the Dum Dum raid this evening, Swapan, a member of a Citu backed union, had been driving buses for the last 25 years.

“We will find out if he had been involved in any other major accident,” Roy said.

A compensation package was announced today for the families of the dead. Tapas Chatterjee, chairman of the Rajarhat and Gopalpur municipality, said the family of each dead passenger would get Rs 50,000 from the government and Rs 25,000 from the municipality.

“We have decided to give the compensation on humanitarian grounds although it was a private bus because most of those who died were the breadwinners of their families,” Chatterjee said.

The compensation promised by the government had the SUCI crying foul. Around 60 activists blocked a road near the accident spot this afternoon, throwing traffic out of gear for 20 minutes. They demanded Rs 10 lakh each for the families of the dead and Rs 5 lakh for each injured.

Nearly 40 SUCI supporters demonstrated outside the Lalbazar police headquarters this afternoon, protesting against the delay in deploying disaster management personnel at the accident site. The police arrested 31 of them.