Dozens of vehicles, including ambulances, from Andhra Pradesh were stuck up at the entry points along the inter-State borders shared by the erstwhile composite Nalgonda district with Andhra Pradesh as the police enforced stricter curbs on the inter-State movement of vehicles on Friday.
Several ambulances headed to Hyderabad from Andhra Pradesh were turned away by the police at the Ramapuram border point in Suryapet district on Friday morning after the crew reportedly failed to produce the hospital appointment documents and authorisation passes from the COVID control rooms as mandated by the Telangana government.
Some emergency vehicles carrying COVID-19 patients and others in need of emergency medicare from Andhra Pradesh to Hyderabad had to return back midway from the border points near Ramapuram, Wadapalli and Nagarjunasagar in the old undivided Nalgonda district, sources said.
Police sources said that personnel deployed at border checkposts were implementing the new guidelines issued by the State government pertaining to regulation of vehicles/ambulances carrying patients from other States into Telangana as per the stipulated instructions.
The new guidelines were issued as per the provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, and the Disaster Management Act, 2005, sources added.
A woman, accompanying an ailing elderly woman in an ambulance from Vijayawada, deplored that their emergency vehicle was stranded at Ramapuram entry point along the inter-State border for more than half-an-hour.
“Despite showing the documents in proof of the confirmed admission in a Hyderabad-based private hospital, the police personnel insisted on production of authorisation passes from the control room in Hyderabad,” she lamented, expressing fears of depletion of the limited oxygen stock in the ambulance.
The curbs on the movement of ambulances amid the COVID-19 pandemic is totally unjustifiable and stringent stipulations on the inter-State movement of emergency vehicles in these difficult times could prove fatal for the critically-ill patients, said another attendant of a patient on board another ambulance from Andhra Pradesh, in deep agony.
Meanwhile, border checks were intensified in the old undivided Khammam district on the third day of the lockdown in force to curb the COVID-19 spread.
