Lifeline Foundation was created with the sole intention (the vision has since broadened) of providing life saving medical facilities to accident victims on highways of Gujarat.
The Foundation's premier and initial activity was to create the Highway Rescue Project (HRP); it was born out of a physically unbearable and mentally distressful experiences, the founding trustee had to undergo.
Dr. Subroto Das and his wife Sushmita, along with two colleagues met with an accident in August 1999 on a rainy night on NH8. Badly injured, they were left stranded without any help for four dark hours. Without losing hope they fought for their and the lives of their colleagues. At early dawn, they finally managed help and got transported to a hospital.
Time spent during recovery was used to crystallize HRP. With singular focus for three years, the couple worked on various ideas to make sure that lives are not lost on highways of Gujarat.
We were lucky to be alive, we do not want others to die on the highway", is their motivating force.
Numerous ideas extending from traffic management, driver education, road safety, research and development, etc. were deliberated upon and later rejected. None of them assured accident victims safety of a hospital. That is where the idea of an integrated and centralized network of ambulances and other rescue utilities was developed, a concept unheard of and un-experimented in South Asia.
Without owning a single facility, the couple with this refreshing new idea spent three years networking ambulances, cranes, metal cutters, police facilities, hospitals and blood banks to launch HRP on NH8 between Ahmedabad and Surat on 1st July, 2002.
Painfully mapping the highway, developing means to locate the accident site without GPS, setting up a 24 hours control room with no precedence of this magnitude in South Asia, the couple with their team has extended HRP to two more states making it a national movement.
