In yet another shocking instance of apathy, a commuter became a casualty of the authorities’ poor planning.
A 35-year-old woman died on January 2 at Titwala even as the railways and civic administration refused point blank to help the government railway police. A police constable, SM Mandole, went beyond the call of duty and spent Rs 1,500 from her own pocket to try and save the victim. She claims the railways are now refusing to even reimburse the money.
The incident took place at around 7.25pm. The Titwala station master informed Mandole that a woman was lying unconscious in the luggage compartment of a Titwala local. The victim was immediately taken to Kalyan Civic Hospital, where a doctor requested that she be shifted to Sion Hospital.
However, one ambulance was busy and the other was broken. The constable had to hire an ambulance to shift the victim immediately to Sion Hospital, but it was too late, and the victim was pronounced dead on arrival.
The next day, Mandole met station master SS Kolhare and handed over an application affixed with the accident memo and a copy of the ambulance bill. But Kolhare refused to accept the application and reimburse her, saying that he was entitled to give only Rs750. She then wrote a letter to her superior. ACP Bapu Thombre of GRP, Mumbai, said, “We will take this issue up in a top central railway officials’ meeting soon.”
“We have been urging the railway administration to shift accident victims to the nearest private hospitals as early as possible. Yet such cases come up regularly,’’ said Samir Zaveri, who lost both legs during a rail accident at Borivali, and is now spearheading a campaign against the railways by filing PILs in the Bombay high court. ‘’Why can’t the railways put a policy in place? Agreed that their priority is to run trains, but since such incidents are on the rise in Mumbai, they could appoint medical officers at each station, authorised to deal with the logistics of shifting patients to hospitals and then coordinating with them,” said Subhash Gupta, former member of the National Railway Users Consultative Committee.
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