The air emergency service industry is pushing the Centre and the state government to introduce a policy to fund helicopter air ambulances, which they say will save the lives of thousands of highway accident victims every year.
“The death toll on the highways is high,” said Dr. Shalini Nalwad, co-founder of the International Critical Care Air Transfer Team (ICATT), an air ambulance service in South India which has been primarily using fixed-wing aircraft since 2016 to transport priority care patients from rural areas to metropolises for treatment.
The statement is backed by statistics from the National Crimes Records Bureau (NCRB), which has registered a steady increase in the number of road accident fatalities since 2011.
