A friend of an Adelaide family involved in a fatal car crash in India says the two surviving children are recovering well from surgery but have not yet been told of the deaths of their parents.
Hemambaradhar "Hems" Peddagamalla and his wife Rama Batthula were killed when their taxi crashed near Hyderabad on Wednesday, on their way to the funeral of Ms Batthula's father.
Their children Bhavagna, 9, and Palvith, 6, were injured in the crash, and family friend Vijay Akkineni this morning told ABC Radio Adelaide that, medically, "the kids are doing well".
But he said the emotional trauma was still to come.
"The little boy, the six-year-old — he had his surgery a few days back and he's recovering very well, and the girl, a nine-year-old, she went for surgery last night and the surgery went well and both the kids are in good spirits," Dr Akkineni said.
"That's a very hard part on us, even we, as adults, are struggling to cope with that one …
"But we just wanted to make sure that the kids recover from their injuries before we can put them into a much more traumatic situation."
Mr Peddagamalla was a car salesman and Ms Batthula worked for the Department for Child Protection.
"It was such a happy family, everything was going so smoothly," Dr Akkineni said.
He said the local community had been "so supportive" during a time of immense grief and was now focused on doing what it could to help the children while they remained in India.
But he said one complication was the fact that the children now "don't have any immediate family members here in Australia".
"All their grandparents and extended family is back home in India," Dr Akkineni said.
"We'll look at the legal aspects and other immigration issues which are beyond my comprehension at this stage.
"That's the challenge and long path ahead of us, to try to give them the better future that their parents always would have wanted for them to have."
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas said it was a tragic situation that had shocked "us all to the core".
He said the Department of the Premier and Cabinet had contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to try to expedite the children's return to Australia.
"The full resources of my department and its international engagement section with DFAT will do everything it possibly can," he said.
"And then of course the journey just begins for this family and these beautiful kids."
Mr Malinauskas said he hoped federal authorities, including DFAT, would "use all the options the law provides for in these circumstances to see a compassionate response".
"If that means providing visas for grandparents then I think [that] should be pursued assertively," he said.
DFAT has been contacted for comment.
