A day after the pilot vehicle of a Kerala minister hit an ambulance toppling it over, there was outrage with many people condemning it and calling for VIPs to follow traffic rules. The incident happened on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 12 when the speeding pilot jeep of Education Minister V Sivankutty, breaking all traffic rules and taking the wrong side, hit an ambulance carrying a patient to a hospital at the busy Kottarakara junction, about 70 km from the state capital of Thiruvananthapuram.
The impact of the crash was such that the ambulance overturned injuring the five passengers. After the crash, Sivankutty came out of his vehicle and after observing what was happening for a few minutes continued his journey to Thiruvananthapuram.
Ashok Kumar, whose wife was being moved from a hospital to the taluk hospital at Kottarakara, said that he suffered a fracture in the accident. “We expected that the minister would come and find out what had happened to us, but he left the spot in a few minutes,” said Ashok.
What was worse was that the local police failed to even register a case and when the driver of the ambulance approached the police to register a complaint he got a dressing down from the police officers.
“The police behaved very rudely with me and said I should dump my vehicle (ambulance).They said I had broken the rules as the traffic signal was off and in that situation I should not have gone forward as a minister was coming. In fact, the traffic warden at the junction seeing my ambulance had given me the signal to move forward,” said the driver.
With TV channels calling out the rash behaviour of the police and the way Sivankutty left the spot, the police on Thursday afternoon registered a case and charged the driver of the pilot jeep and the ambulance driver.
Dijo Kappen, an expert on the Motor Vehicles Act, said even though VIPs, ministers, and others are a busy lot, under the Act’s 1989 (Amendment), privilege of movement on the road is given to just fire engines and ambulances and no one else.
“The sad fact is those who frame the laws in the Assembly or in Parliament are the ones who break them. Nowhere else do we find such blatant violation of traffic rules,” said Kappen.
Sivankutty is yet to react to this incident.