Make Highway Rescue Work

The NHAI's decision to fix a ten-minute response time for ambulances attending accidents within a ten-kilometre radius and a one-hour window to deliver victims to the nearest hospital deserves to be read as more than a bureaucratic circular. With lakhs of accidents recorded on India's highways every year, and thousands of lives lost simply because help arrived too late, this order finally puts the "golden hour" principle at the centre of highway management. The accompanying penalty clause of Rs 10,000 for missed deadlines, rejected tickets, or missing equipment and staff gives the policy some teeth, and the use of AIS-140-compliant GPS tracking and mobile data terminals should, in theory, make accountability verifiable rather than aspirational.

Nobody disputes the intent. Most accident victims are at their most vulnerable in the minutes immediately following a crash, and timely medical intervention can be the difference between life and death. Yet the practicality of the order is where doubts creep in. India's highways are not uniform ribbons of smooth tarmac; they are frequently choked with traffic, littered with construction diversions, and, in several states, simply unfinished. Take Jammu and Kashmir as an example. Long stretches of national highway here have remained under construction for years, with dilapidated surfaces producing routine, hours-long jams. Expecting an ambulance to reach a victim in ten minutes under such conditions is, quite frankly, wishful thinking rather than policy. The Jammu-Srinagar highway illustrates a different but equally serious problem. During the monsoon, landslides regularly block entire stretches of the road, sometimes for hours, cutting off access completely. No amount of GPS monitoring or penalty clauses can move a boulder off the carriageway. Similar conditions prevail across most hilly national highways in other states too.

This is precisely why NHAI ought to seriously consider air ambulances for such terrain. India already collects substantial revenue through cess, toll tax, road tax and a host of other levies on highway users. Redirecting a fraction of this towards air ambulance services in landslide-prone and congestion-heavy hill regions should not be treated as a luxury; it is, quite simply, a life-saving necessity. Set against the enormous number of lives lost annually on our roads, the long-term cost of maintaining such a service would be modest compared with the value of the lives it would save. A ten-minute deadline is a fine ambition on paper. Making it real on India's hill highways will require more than penalties alone.