Ambulances Used As Cabs To Beat Curbs

Busted! Cash-and-ride racket in emergency vehicles

- Jamshed Khan, Nitin Jain and Md. Hizbullah

An ambulance can be a life-saver, more so during a pandemic. But an India Today TV investigation has found how some of these emergency vehicles are doubling up as private taxis to cash in on the national lockdown.

The probe has found several ambulance operators, attached to some hospitals, ferrying healthy passengers from one state to another in exchange for cash fares.

Bina Sharma, an ambulance service provider in Delhi, demanded ₹3,500 for transporting five people to Aligarh.

Sharma, part of the non-profit Manav Janhit Kalyan Sansthan, told India Today TV’s undercover reporters that potential travellers may have to accompany a corpse in her ambulance.

“You may have to accompany a body. There’s nothing to worry about. The body won’t cling to you. We do it all the time, eat and sleep with bodies beside,” Sharma said.

FAKING ILLNESS

She recommended that the undercover reporters fake illness and get a hospital card to show at police check-points on the way.