(From top) The buses involved in the head-on collision near Bantala on Friday morning and Cognizant employees Bhaskar Saha and Soumya Chakraborty recuperate in a city hospital. (Bhubaneswarananda Halder)

A busload of Cognizant employees headed for office were injured on Friday morning when the chartered vehicle collided head-on with another bus on a bad road made worse by rain.

The vehicle was headed for the IT company’s Bantala campus when it crashed into an Esplanade-bound Calcutta Tramways Company bus (WB04D 5741) at a bend near Bantala bridge on the Basanti highway around 10.15am.

Neither driver apparently saw the other vehicle approaching at the bend without signage, around 12km from the Science City junction on the EM Bypass.

Cognizant Technology Solutions said 24 of its 45 employees in the bus were injured, of whom four required hospitalisation. The two drivers, the conductor of the CTC bus and a Rabindra Bharati student were also hospitalised.

Bhaskar Saha, a 24-year-old Cognizant employee from Tripura seated in the third row from the front of the chartered bus, recounted a loud noise and a jolt before he ended up with a bloodied face. “Our bus took the bend and bang, we were almost thrown off our seats. I injured my face and started bleeding profusely from my nose…. I almost lost consciousness,” he told Metro at Ruby General Hospital.

His colleague Soumya Chakraborty, 26, who was seated in the middle of the bus, banged his head against the seat in front of him and blanked out for a while. When he regained consciousness, he was “on a motorbike headed towards the Bypass”. He was then shifted to a taxi that took him to Ruby.

Hospital officials said Soumya suffered a head injury. “We are keeping him under observation,” said Brig (retd) S.B. Purkayastha, the CEO of Ruby General Hospital.

Two other Cognizant employees — Ipsita Roy, 24, of New Santoshpur Road and Mandira Dalal, 28, of Tiljala — were admitted to Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals. Their driver, 33-year-old Bidyut Mukherjee of Sonarpur, had also been taken to Apollo but was shifted to another hospital.

The driver of the CTC bus, 44-year-old Nani Gopal Nayek, was admitted to Calcutta National Medical College and Hospital along with conductor Sanjib Saha and student Debi Mondal. Another passenger was discharged in the evening.

Around 20 Cognizant employees were treated for cuts and bruises at Fortis Hospital and Ruby on the Bypass. They included a pregnant woman whose family took her away from Ruby about half an hour after she had been brought in.

An official at Apollo Gleneagles said the two Cognizant employees admitted there underwent “minor surgeries” to repair soft-tissue injuries. “They are stable and have been kept in general wards,” he said.

Six of the injured taken to Fortis Hospital underwent tests before being allowed to go. “No serious injury showed up in CT scans and X-rays,” said Ashish Nandi, head of the hospital’s emergency wing. “A few of them needed stitches for deep cuts.”

Cognizant issued a statement saying none of the injured was in danger.

“Twenty-four Cognizant associates sustained injuries in the accident. All except four associates have been discharged from hospitals after administering first-aid. The four are out of danger but under medical supervision on the advice of the attending doctors. We are providing all help and support to the injured associates,” a spokesperson said.

Cognizant Green Tech Park is 15km from Science City and barely 3km from the accident site.

“Several stretches of the Bantala highway are in a poor condition. There are many sharp turns without signage and drivers who are not careful end up being unsighted, missing vehicles coming from the opposite side,” said an officer at Pragati Maidan police station.

Rabindra Bharati student Dipanwita Sardar, who was with friend Debi Mondal, in the other bus said: “We stay at Ghushikata along the Basanti highway. Every day we take a bus till Science City, from where we take another to reach our university. The entire stretch of the Basanti highway is horrible. No maintenance is ever done here and accidents are frequent.”

Dipanwita, who suffered an injury to her left eye, was discharged from hospital on Friday evening after doctors put a medicated patch on it.