A Bangalore Ambulance Driver’s Battle with Traffic

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Rush hour traffic jams piling up on an access road in Bangalore, Karnataka, on May 6, 2008.

BANGALOREâ€" Srirangaiah, 55, is an expert - and somewhat maniacal - Bangalore driver.  Day after day, he dangerously hops lanes in traffic. He deliberately jumps red lights and speeds the wrong way on one-way streets. Often, he hurtles in the direction of oncoming traffic.

In traffic-gridlocked Bangalore, Mr. Srirangaiah (who goes by a single name) has held a nerve-racking job for 19 years.  He is an ambulance driver at the government-run heart hospital, the Jayadeva Institute of Cardiology, which caters mainly to the middle class.  When he is summoned to pick up somebody who has just suffered a heart attack or stroke, Mr. Srirangaiah speeds to the given address as fast as traffic permits. The return journey is a rush to get the patient to the hospital for emergency help before the attack turns fatal.

Rush hour in Bangalore, or any Indian metropolis for that matter, does not present the most ideal traffic conditions for somebody who has just suffered a heart attack or a life-threatening injury. Pizza delivery boys, whose two-wheelers weave easily through the dense traffic, are said to arrive more reliably than an emergency ambulance in Bangalore and other Indian cities. And helicopter ambulances are unheard of in India, except in disaster-struck, impassable areas.

“Driving an ambulance in this city is extremely stressful,” said Mr. Srirangaiah, who battles his way through roads where peak hour traffic moves slower than 10 kilometers, or 6 miles, per hour. Relatives of the patient, often angry and anxious about the slow arrival of the ambulance, goad him to drive faster on the way to the hospital. “I drive as quickly as I can. It is not just my profession but my duty to save lives,” he said. Despite the best efforts of the ambulance driver and the doctor or nurse on hand, a life cannot always be saved.

When Y. Ramachandra, a tailor in the Ramamurthynagar neighborhood in eastern Bangalore, suffered a head injury after his motorcycle skidded on a wet road recently, a passerby summoned an ambulance.  His wife, Navarathna, said the hour spent watching her husband bleed profusely through his nose and ears before reaching the hospital was the longest of her life. The ambulance hit several jams on the way to the city’s leading neurology hospital, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences.  Mr. Ramachandra is now recovering, but “I was very, very scared that he would not survive the ride,” said Ms. Navarathna.

Mr. Srirangaiah drives with sirens blaring, but the congested Bangalore streets are the bane of his life.  In a city lacking public transportation, the traffic jams have been getting worse. The roads have changed in the past decade, according to Bangalore’s ambulance drivers: Vehicles have multiplied. Traffic lights are at every corner.  Everybody is in a hurry.  “All those software engineers are always in a rush because they have to get to work,” Mr.Srirangaiah said.

Then there are the drivers on the road who ignore the piercing siren. A few try to tailgate the ambulance as police officers clear the way.  Sometimes, ambulance staff use megaphone announcements to plead for space.

Linga Kumar drives an ambulance for the government’s Sanjay Gandhi Hospital, and he takes accident and trauma victims who arrive for emergency care to specialty hospitals nearby.  “Sikkapatte traffic!” he said, using a colloquial expression in the local Kannada language to describe the excess on the roads.  “A distance I used to cover in 10 minutes five years ago takes 30 to 40 minutes today.”

The vehicle density on Bangalore’s roads is second only to the country’s capital, New Delhi, but Bangalore only has a small fraction of Delhi’s road network and public transport infrastructure.  Sometimes the ambulance arrives after the family has tired of waiting and has sent the heart attack or asthma attack patient to a hospital in a three-wheel auto rickshaw.

Then there is the occasional episode of road rage.  Recently, while transporting a heart attack victim, Mr. Srirangaiah’s ambulance grazed a car on the road.  The livid car driver blocked the ambulance’s way, and a heated argument ensued.  The ambulance driver finally backed off.  “I decided that staying calm is in the best interest of the patient,” said Mr. Srirangaiah.  He frequently gets his blood pressure checked to ensure that job stress is not taking a toll on his health.

The city’s traffic managers are often powerless in clearing traffic for an ambulance.  If the police’s Traffic Management Centre is alerted, then police officers at various junctions can be notified to clear the route, said Vasant Bhagwat, who heads the center. Each police officer alerts his counterpart at the next junction.  And the situation could improve in the coming months, when a real-time ambulance map, operating with GPS, will be generated at the center, and software will be used to control traffic lights to create corridors for ambulances to pass.

The city is dotted with billboards that instruct in Kannada, “Make way for the ambulance.” M.B. Kumaraswamy, another ambulance driver, said public sensitivity towards ambulances on the road is vital.  “An ambulance driver cannot save lives singlehandedly.”

Saritha Rai sometimes feels she is the only person living in Bangalore who was actually raised here. There’s never a dull moment in her mercurial metropolis. Reach her on Twitter @SarithaRai.