There is a serial killer, who plagues the village of Peddakunta Thanda in Mahbubnagar, Telengana. The killer has claimed the lives of 80 men from the village, turning it into a community of widows. Today there are no men left in the village, reports The Times of India.
This killer is, in fact, a strip of road, a ‘bypass’ for National Highway 44, which began claiming lives in 2006, when it first began operating.
When the bypass came their way, residents of Peddakunta Thanda also looked forward to a service road, which would provide them safe access to Nandigam, the panchayat headquarters 5 km away. But the service road never materialised and January 2006 saw the start of a series of hit-and-run accidents on the bypass.
Since then, this stretch of road has claimed the lives of 80 people – 30 men from Peddakunta, two men from Banda Kunta and the rest from other nearby villagers. Today, the oldest surviving male in Peddakunta Thanda is all of six years old.
In a macabre kind of reality, the widows from these village are today labelled NH44 widows and the deaths of their husbands is only one of their woes.
“I am not sure if my two children will be safe here,” said 39-year-old Korra Panni, in an interview with TOI. Panni’s husband was killed while crossing the road when he was returning from daily wage work in 2013.
“So I admitted them to the government hostels at Kothur and Shadnagar. My youngest child lives with me, but finding work is hard.”
The loss of its men has exposed the village to another threat: at night, strangers from neighbouring areas knock on the doors of the widows, most of whom are between 20 and 38 years of age.
“This has to be a curse from the Gods,” exclaimed Nenavath Rukya, who lost her three sons and her son-in-law to a hit-and-run on that stretch of road. “What else can explain that every man in the village has been taken away from us? What sin have we committed?”
Yet, even as Rukya was grieving for her sons, she was faced with the prospect of men from nearby villages making sexual advances towards her widowed daughters-in-law. “To protect them from these men, I had to force them to return to their parents,” Rukya said.
India has the deadliest roads in the world, with one person dying every five minutes in an accident, says National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. In the past decade, 1.2 million Indians have died on the country’s roads.
Image Courtesy: paul prescott / Shutterstock
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