A Bharatiya Janata Party legislator from Uttar Pradesh’s Etah district, Vipin Verma David, came to the rescue of the members of a Muslim family, who were lying unattended after a road accident on the Agra-Lucknow Expressway on Monday.
The member of legislative assembly (MLA) was on his way to Lucknow to attend the state assembly session when he saw a crowd surrounding a car that had overturned and fallen off the expressway near Pilakhna village in Unnao.
“The crowd was simply watching the damaged Alto car that had fallen aside the roadside railing where a Muslim family of five was lying ... I decided to get down and do whatever I could and found an injured woman with her face down in the mud. She murmured ‘Allah’ when we helped her out,” David told the Hindustan Times on the phone on Wednesday.
The family, residents of Kannauj, was heading to Deva Shareef near Faizabad when they met with the accident.
He said two men and two women were injured and one woman was dead after the accident. The women were seriously injured and hurriedly brought up in a ‘chatai’ (jute sheet) to the expressway.
“An ambulance was called besides a Police Response Vehicle and the injured were moved to the Lucknow Trauma Centre,” he added.
“Although I was getting late but followed my duty as a human being and public representative first and thus went after the ambulance and assured their admission in the trauma centre before leaving,” the MLA said and added it was only when the woman said ‘Allah’ that he came to know that they were Muslims.
“It did not matter to me and I did not care for the time of about three hours that I had to remain with them. We tried to talk to and interact with the injured so that they remained conscious and fit for treatment when they reached Lucknow,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}“It did not matter to me and I did not care for the time of about three hours that I had to remain with them. We tried to talk to and interact with the injured so that they remained conscious and fit for treatment when they reached Lucknow,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}On Wednesday, the MLA got a call from the family thanking him for his help and also expressed its wishes to meet him.
“The family members informed that the injured were recovering and this was enough for me that my gesture turned fruitful,” the MLA said
He also assured the family that he will meet them as they expressed a desire to meet him in Etah.
According to government data, a person dies every 3.7 minutes in road accidents across the country, which is known for rash driving, inadequate traffic enforcement, badly maintained roads and poor quality cars.
Experts say many road accident victims lose their life simply because they fail to get timely medical treatment. Many bystanders do not help the injured as they fear they could get embroiled in a police investigation or subjected to harassment due to the legal procedures involved if they provide first-aid, ferry the injured to a hospital or even call for medical or police assistance.
In 2016, the Supreme Court approved the Centre’s guidelines to protect Good Samaritans, who help road accident victims, from being unnecessarily harassed by police or any other authority.