The increasing frequency and severity of Road Traffic Accidents (RTA) in India have caused grave concern for road safety, posing serious challenge to transport policy makers, planners, regulators, police, engineers and civil society alike. With just 1% of world’s vehicles, India leads with 10% of world’s total Road Traffic Fatalities, resulting in untold misery to lakhs of people and costing about 3% of the GDP1. Due to the impact of the RTA, the United Nations declared the current decade “the decade of action for road safety with a goal to save five million lives”2. Post-crash response is very critical to reduce the mortality and morbidity due to accidents. Piramal Swasthya in collaboration with the National Highways Authority of India and General Insurance Company set up the Highway Emergency Response and Accident Mitigation Service between Hyderabad and Vijayawada, as a pilot project to address the post-crash response.
Objective
The objectives of this paper are 1. To describe the functioning of a highway emergency response and accident mitigation service and 2. To characterize the profile of the accidents and the victims served by this project