Make every life count

Pankaj Bhandari

The first 20 years of my life were spent in the beautiful city of Chandigarh. Back in 1996, when I passed out from Panjab Engineering College in Computer Science, I wanted to stay forever in Chandigarh, but as destiny would have it, I ended up in the US.

I have been living in America for over 15 years now have been a regular visitor to India, specifically Chandigarh. On an average, two to three visits take place every year to the City Beautiful for family or business reasons.

On October 19 last year, I was in Montreal, Canada, to attend a business meeting, when I received a call from my mother in India. In a terrified voice, she told me that there had been a massive blast at the house of one of our neighbours. As reported in the newspapers on October 24, several people died in that unfortunate incident. I personally knew most of the people who had died. That broke my heart.

With a first-hand experience of this incident, I started to think what efforts could have been taken by the local administration to rescue people. After a few days, I forgot about the incident and got on with life.

Frisco is a beautiful community in the northern US state of Texas. It has a large population of Indians here. On February 1, while I was working from home, I heard the noise of helicopters flying over at some distance. There are two schools in the area where the helicopters were flying. I panicked and started walking towards that area.

On my way, I saw the schools where the kids were playing outside. I felt somewhat relieved but still wanted to know what was going on. I found out that a construction worker had got stuck in a machine. He had sustained injuries, but they were not life threatening. So, how did the local administration of Frisco acted after the incident?

Within minutes of the incident, two helicopters flew in from the hospitals and brought the doctors. The police, ambulance and the fire brigade also arrived in a split second. The whole area was condoned off with no access to the public.

I could see from a distance that there were at least 30-40 police cars and ambulances at the incident spot. A total of four choppers were flying above as standby.

Seeing all this support from the local government, I was simply amazed. I thought, had this support or even a fraction of this help come to the blast victims in Panchkula, they could have been saved. Only if the police vans or the ambulances had arrived on time beating the traffic-clogged roads, only if the doctors at the leading Chandigarh hospitals had administered proper treatment for the gas inhaled, only if the helicopters had flown the victims to the best hospitals across the country, several precious lives would have been saved. And there are many such incidents happening across India every day where the public needs immediate response and support from the system, but it never arrives.