Rattled by the Saheli Roy incident, the traffic police top brass sent a circular to all police stations and senior officers on Friday, reminding them that accident victims must be taken to the nearest hospital — government or private — which has emergency facilities.

Saheli, 25, was taken by the police to a hospital six km from the accident site on the Bypass because it is government-owned rather than to one that was a stone’s throw away since it is private.

The circular is intended to hammer home the point that after an accident, “preservation of human life is of paramount importance” and bureaucratic procedures should not come in the way, as the courts have ruled.

Apart from the 48 police stations, the circular was sent to all divisional deputy commissioners of police and to the officers-in-charge of all the 14 traffic guards.

Sent by K. Hari Rajan, the additional commissioner of police (traffic), the circular contains two orders issued by the Supreme Court about making emergency medicare available to accident victims and a synopsis of Section 134 of the Motor Vehicles Act.

The act specifies the duties of a driver of a vehicle involved in an accident and of a doctor in offering treatment. The two court orders, passed in 1989 and 1996, emphasise the sole objective — in an accident — of getting medical treatment on time to the victim.

Hari Rajan said: “Once an officer is aware of the rules governing admission and treatment of an accident victim, he would not think twice about whether to rush the victim to the nearest hospital or ferry him a few kilometres away. When every minute matters, it is mandatory for the officer out in the road handling an accident victim to know the rules.”

Purnendu Sinha, an officer from Phoolbagan police station, had taken Saheli, two of her colleagues and the driver of their car to NRS Hospital instead of to Apollo Gleneagles, revealing that he was unaware of the guidelines for admission and treatment of an accident victim, said a senior officer. “This directive will possibly ensure such an incident is not repeated,” he added.

Sinha’s superior officer at the police station had defended him on the grounds that policemen did not want to go to private hospitals because they faced “a barrage of questions”, the key among which was who would pay.

Partha Sarathi Ghosh, the deputy commissioner (eastern suburban division), even went to the extent of saying the officer had done nothing wrong by taking Saheli to a government hospital. The lack of awareness about rules may not be restricted to the lower levels of the force alone.