Pilgrims fake medical emergencies, hire ambulances as taxis to skip Kedarnath queue; vehicles seized | Dehradun News

DEHRADUN: It was the flashing beacons and shrill hooters of two ambulances cutting through the crowd at Sonprayag that caught the attention of a police team on duty near the Kedarnath trek route. The vehicles, moving swiftly towards Gaurikund — the last motorable point before the 16-km uphill journey to the revered shrine — gave every appearance of rushing to a medical emergency.Yet no such call had been received on Saturday. No accident had been reported. No distress signal sent from Gaurikund, which, incidentally, does not even have a hospital to receive patients. The sirens, as it turned out, masked no urgency other than the impatience of a few pilgrims trying to skip the queue to the revered temple.Inside the ambulances, police found no stretchers, no bandaged limbs or wheezing patients. Instead, they discovered three men dressed as pilgrims, calmly seated and very much uninjured. The drivers—Nikhil Wilson Massih from Haridwar and Krishna Kumar from Amroha—told officers that the vehicles had been hired not for rescue, but for convenience. One ambulance, air-conditioned and classified as a “luxury” model, had been booked by a single pilgrim. The other, more basic, carried two. On their way uphill from Haridwar, the drivers had picked up three more passengers, squeezing them in as if the ambulances were taxis on a meter. The stretch between Sonprayag and Gaurikund, barely 2km long, is typically traversed on foot or by the shared shuttle service that ferries pilgrims back and forth. From Gaurikund, the real pilgrimage begins: a steep, hours-long trek through thinning air and winding terrain. That is, unless you can fake an ailment, rent an ambulance, and drive past those following the path the old-fashioned way. Police said both vehicles were seized near the Acrow bridge after officers grew suspicious. “The unusual thing was that the ambulance was moving towards Gaurikund and that too with people who had posed as patients. If someone is unwell, there is no reason for going towards Gaurikund to take the trek route,” a policeman at Sonprayag told TOI. “If there had been some medical emergency, an ambulance should have moved towards Sonprayag, Rampur and Rudraprayag. Therefore, it was very surprising for the police team.” The three original passengers fled on foot through the crowd at Sonprayag before they could be questioned. Police issued challans to both drivers and registered violations under the Motor Vehicle Act. The drivers maintained that they had no knowledge of how much money had changed hands and claimed they were merely driving the ambulances as instructed by the vehicle owners. “Our job was just to take the ambulances up to Gaurikund,” one of them said.