He belongs to the 40 traffic policemen who were trained in a `Basic Life Support' programme at the LTMG Hospital at Sion recently. These policemen, including eight officers and 32 constables, have undergone a 15-day crash course in life saving techniques wherein they are taught simple procedures which can decrease the mortality rate in accident cases to a large extent.

``We have been taught to extricate the victim from the vehicle, check for fractures, injuries on the neck and spinal cord, set splints for the fractured bones, note down the blood pressure of the victim, position him side-on in the taxi and then send him to the hospital. All this in two minutes,'' says Tawde nonchalantly.

A tough proposition, admits the dean of the Sion hospital Dr R G Shirhatti. ``Even doctors take nearly five minutes to complete the entire procedure, but these guys didit in just two-and-a-half,'' he says. The two minute deadline for the rescue operation assumes significance in the light of the fact that hospitals in the city lose one out of every five accident victims because they don't reach the hospitals in time. ``Half of the patients that we lose, die during the first 24 hours, because their injuries are so advanced that their chances of survival are nil,'' says Dr Shirhatti.

However, the cops claim that that is not the only reason. ``If we take a long time attending to the victim, the crowd will get restive and there will be a law and order problem,'' says constable Vishwananth Pawar.

Though shifting of the victim to the nearest hospital from the site of the accident remains the immediate concern of the cops, the programme aims at making sure that the injuries are not aggravated during this time. When these policemen reach an accident spot, they will have an `accident kit', a red bag filled with assortments of first aid tools at hand including a plastic cervicalcollar, a board to place the victim, various types of splints and bandages. They then use these instruments to safely take the victim out of the vehicle and take him to a hospital.