Noting that the BEST accident in Bhandup in December 2025 could have been avoided had the driver Santosh Sawant refused to operate the electric bus citing lack of proper training, the sessions court rejected his bail application.

The court also said that it was the “lethargy of the employee in protesting against the employer” for not imparting training.

“…it was not a casual accident. It could have been avoided by the accused by plainly refusing to drive the bus of which he was barely having knowledge how to drive. He knew that he had not been given training by the department. He knew that he was unaware about the ABC of the driving technique of the bus. He casually seated on driver seat, allowed the bus to become uncontroll and let the consequences happened i.e. running over the bus upon hundreds of people. Such lethargy of the employee in protesting against the employer for nonimparting training needs to be viewed with proper sensitivity,” additional sessions judge Y P Manathkar said in the order passed on April 10.

Sawant was arrested has been behind bars since over three months, after a bus he was driving ran down four passengers and injured 12 others on December 29, 2025, outside Bhandup railway station.

His lawyer Devendra Patil told court that the chargesheet filed against Sawant shows that his name is not included in the list of drivers who completed training to operate electric buses.

Additional public prosecutor Iqbal Solkar said that four people had lost their lives and it was a serious incident.

The court said that Sawant’s lawyer has cited a document to admit that his name is not included in the list of drivers who underwent training. It said that a bus has 55 passengers and the accused driver had opted to drive such a large vehicle on a public road without training.

“The part of training to drive the EV bus came to be skipped, either because of fault on the part of the applicant or the fault on the part of BEST administration. The implications of this were horrible. It is always found that whenever such tragedy is happened, all the concerned persons/entity pass the blame to one another, to save his own skin,” the court said.

This is the second incident in which courts have commented on the prima facie lack of training to BEST drivers.

On March 30, while granting bail to Sanjay More, who was arrested in December 2024, in a similar accident in Kurla, where nine persons lost their lives, the Bombay High Court had said that the BEST authorities were required to impart training for at least seven days to the drivers operating EV buses.