NEW DELHI: Ambulances deployed on NHs will face a Rs 10,000 penalty for failing to reach an incident site within 10 minutes, while a similar penalty will apply if they fail to take a victim to a hospital within the critical “golden hour”.National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) on Wednesday tightened the service-level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) for ambulances, cranes and patrolling vehicles deployed for incident management across the national highway network.There are around 3,000 ambulances and 1,000 patrol vehicles and cranes each covering nearly 50,000 km of highways under the NHAI.All these vehicles are equipped with GPS and dedicated mobile devices running the NHAI Care application, which relays crash-location information to response vehicles and records the action taken and other data during emergencies.Under the revised norms, a penalty of Rs 2,500 will be imposed if the NHAI Care app is unavailable in a vehicle for more than 1% of the time in a day. A similar penalty will apply if the vehicle’s GPS is not live.Govt has rolled out its helpline no 1033 across NH network to report any problem. In case of emergency, people get guided through this helpline number to book an ambulance. A dedicated 24X7 team issues tickets for ambulances, cranes and patrol vehicles for quick response.

As per the new norm, if a vehicle delays in accepting a ticket within a minute, it will be liable to pay Rs 5,000 fine and rejecting to accept a ticket will cost Rs 10,000.It also specifies that every ambulance must do a 5 km dry run daily.Officials said the focus of the new norm is to ensure that these vehicles can swiftly come to anyone’s instance when required. NH stretches under NHAI accounted for 49,675 deaths in 2024, which was around one-fourth of all 1.77 road fatalities.Quick medical care can save 50% lives.