Noida, A journey that would ordinarily be measured in traffic signals and minutes was reduced to a race against time: A donor heart travelled nearly 20 kilometres from Hindon Airport in Ghaziabad to a hospital in Noida in just 16 minutes, as traffic police cleared the way for the ambulance carrying it.
Noida, Ghaziabad, Delhi and neighbouring cities have repeatedly coordinated such corridors in recent years, turning what was once an exceptional emergency response into an increasingly familiar part of time-critical medical logistics. But the September 9 journey was not an isolated instance in the National Capital Region. In August last year, Noida traffic police created a six-kilometre green corridor from the DND Flyway to Child PGI in Sector 30 to facilitate the transfer of two premature twins. On January 8, 2025, Noida and Faridabad police coordinated a 46.4-kilometre corridor between Amrita Hospital in Faridabad and Yatharth Hospital in Greater Noida for the transportation of a kidney. The distance was covered in 24 minutes and 40 seconds. On October 1, 2021, traffic police created a 14-kilometre corridor from the Delhi-Noida Chilla border to Jaypee Hospital in Sector 128, allowing an ambulance carrying a harvested organ to cover the stretch in 14 minutes. A separate corridor was also deployed that day between Sector 14-A and Jaypee Hospital for another organ-transplant-related emergency.
The ambulance reached the hospital in about four minutes, officials said. He said their effectiveness depended on coordination between hospitals, police and traffic authorities, ambulance teams, airport authorities where required and transplant coordinators. Pre-planning and regular drills could further help identify delays and improve responses before an actual emergency, Arora said, adding that drivers also needed greater awareness about why traffic was being cleared for such journeys. Real-time communication, pre-defined routes, GPS-enabled ambulance tracking and regular emergency drills could strengthen the system, while continued cooperation between healthcare institutions and civic authorities could make the mechanism faster and more reliable, according to Rustagi.
