44 out of 44: Police, ambulances drive their hearts out to save lives
NEWDELHI: His seat belt tightly strapped to his body and hands firmly on the steering wheel, Jai Kumar looks tense as he waits in a Maruti Ertiga at the Indira Gandhi International airport. He has to transport a beating heart to All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where a transplant is scheduled in an hour. At 100km per hour, he covers a 14km journey in 12 minutes, saving man’s life.
Since January 2017, traffic police have arranged 44 green corridors in Delhi, transporting organs harvested from a dying or braindead person in another hospital through green corridors. And a life was saved on each occasion.
Time is of utmost importance in these transplants. A heart needs to be trans- planted within four hours — the earlier the better.
Police say they finalise a route the moment they are alerted. The next step is to rope in traffic officers along the routes. Through a wireless system, traffic inspectors relay the live location of the vehicle carrying the organ.
Unlike VIP routes, an ambulance in a green corridor moves alongside public vehicles. When the ambulance is supposed to pass through a junction, the police switch to manually managing the traffic signals.
The cavalcade includes the ambulance or a Special Utility Vehicle carrying the organ, three police vans and four motorcycles. One van sanitises the route less than five minutes before the ambulance is to pass through. Others prevent public vehicles from blocking the ambulance’s lane.
The ambulances — which can hit a speed of up to 120km per hour — usually travel on the right lane, which is cleared seconds in advance by the police vehicles ahead. The police vans guiding the ambulance are driven by some of the most skilled drivers in the force. The journey is video recorded by two policemen.