Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Save EMRI which saved, saves and would save millions of lives

Save EMRI which saved, saves and would save millions of lives

We just discussed about the bad signages which are eclipsing the growth of Satyam Computer Services. I just thought I would add another related discussion on the same thread. Just about a few months back, the foundation launched EMRI (Emergency Management and Research Institute), a non-profit group, which offers to run free ambulance services in the four southern states of India offering to ferry patients to nearest hospitals.

The telecom operators have also been kind enough to allocate 108 as a toll-free number to reach their contact center to avail of their ambulance services. When I tell this sentence, I have another thought about the same. I am wondering why they chose 108. They should have chosen either 112 or 911 for simple reason that these are world-standard emergency numbers and anyone can reach these numbers from their mobile even with the phone keypad locked.

The recent eclipse on Satyam seems to be casting its ill-effects on EMRI as well. And, as we saw in the previous discussion, this is just a political vendetta similar to the one in Sivaji. EMRI had been functional in Andhra Pradesh for a while. But I came to know of it only after the launch in my state of Tamil Nadu around October 2008. At least till date, their services are well appreciated by all people of my state since otherwise poor people can not afford to hire costly ambulance services of the private hospitals. What's more? The ambulance is also so much equipped with enough first aid medicines to ensure that the ill-fated patient gets rescued and comes out of the trauma as early as possible.

Today, while casually going through some of the articles, I saw the following article in 'Times of India'. For a day, many of the banks have frozen the accounts of these noble service. I am not sure how is God going to penalize and punish them for the heinous sin those people have committed and in that day because of ambulance facing the issues of fuel and resource crisis, if some life has suffered, I think that would be the most dreaded sin accrued by the politicians and bankers.

Let us try to pray Lord Almighty and try to petition to the government to ensure that EMRI services are not affected by these scam-political menace. It is a very noble mission. It does not matter who started this noble life-saving service. But the mission is noble -- lives of millions of poor people are being saved every day, every hour, every minute and every second. If the administrators feel that the founder is corrupt and disgraced, I don't find a valid reason on why they should be keeping mum instead they can fund the non-profit organization and vest the administration to another good service-minded NGO. I am not subscribing to the fact that it should be run by the government. A typical government tenure is 5 years and the party in power, at least in India, gets into cheap tricks of amassing fast bucks by doing all sorts of crazy things. Hence it is better to have this noble mission run by a social-minded third party without any political interference from the government.

Readers: What do you say? Share your comments.

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