81/ 100 Ambulance Dog
Three dogs and their carer in Connaught Place
There are a few places in the world that I would never like to have to find myself. Prison, for obvious reasons, is pretty high up the list. Working on a ship (I get seasick watching TV), one of Dante’s circles of hell (from number 2 downwards because I feel like we are already in circle 1), and Primark are some others. Another place I would never, ever like to end up is aboard an Indian ambulance.
Here in Scotland the government have set targets for ambulance response times. For moderate to severe cases you could expect an ambulance at your door in around 15 to 20 minutes on average, with response times for the most serious cases having a target of 7 minutes. India doesn’t have anything like this largely, I guess, because those times would be embarrassingly long.
If you’re driving along a road, pretty much anywhere in Europe in my own experience, and you see the blue lights of an emergency vehicle in your rear-view mirror you make every effort to make a space so that it can pass along the road and reach its destination as fast as possible. In my own mind I am always thinking—one day that could be me, or someone close to me, so why wouldn’t I move out of the way?
In India that just doesn’t happen. During countless taxi rides in jam-packed roads there were ambulances driving, or at least attempting to drive, along the road with their lights flashing and their sirens blaring and nobody ever moved out of the way. I know that the roads are very busy in the cities in India, but it didn’t seem that was the problem. Here, even if the road is completely full of stationary traffic everyone will edge forward just enough to make a nice space up the middle.
On one of our drives, to the Khan Market in Delhi, we were sat, as usual, in a queue of cars. Only this time, right by the side of our taxi, was a tiny beaten up ambulance with all the lights and sirens switched on, and nobody did anything whatsoever. In front of it was a 4×4 with POLICE written across the back and it didn’t even attempt to move out of the way.
For about 15 minutes we slowly crept along the road and the ambulance stayed in the exact same spot in the queue next to us. You could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps this wasn’t an emergency, but the driver was continually trying to squeeze through, but nobody moved for him. Why is this? I genuinely have no idea. Perhaps someone from India can read this and let me know why nobody thinks it is necessary to let emergency vehicles travel along the road.
There is another very good reason I don’t think I would ever want to be in the back of an ambulance in India. The one in this photograph is an absolute giant amongst Indian ambulances. The most common vehicles you will see are absolutely teeny tiny beaten up Maruti Omni ambulances. The entire Omni is, according to the internet, 3.3m long. There is no way on this earth I would be able to lay down straight in one of them. I guess if I’d broken both femurs they could at least fold me up somehow.
In the large Buddhist complex at Sarnath, close to Varanasi, we saw a bijou ambulance staffed by monks. We were told that they offer basic medical care until the proper ambulance arrives to take the patient to hospital, unless the monks have managed to get the patient back on their feet by then. I could possibly be coerced into one of these simply for the novelty value, and the fact that whether you survived or not, at least it would be peaceful.
My own conclusion to all of this is that if I ever actually need an ambulance, or any urgent medical care, the best thing would be to get strapped onto the back of a Swiggy delivery motorbike and pay the guy Rs 10,000 to take me to the nearest hospital, otherwise I’d be dead long before the ambulance arrived. There’s no need to faff about with treatment—just plug any wounds and hit the road—it’s your only chance.
We walked past the ambulance in this photograph twice in two days, and each day it was parked in exactly the same spot in Mumbai, right outside the Oval Maidan cricket ground. The same dog was there each day, and the driver was also having a nap both days too (did you spot his foot in the window?). I wonder whether perhaps the dog is actually hired by Connect & Heal to wake the driver in the event of a callout assuming, that is, that he also isn’t having a nap.
