BS Number Wise: What happened to ambulance sales during the pandemic?

If you’ve followed media coverage of the pandemic, the image of one vehicle stands out, sirens blaring, in almost every story.

Ambulances have been seen ferrying the sick and the dying, racing on the roads to get to a hospital and more often than not, waiting outside whitewashed buildings for an elusive bed. But who buys ambulances in India, and did they buy more of them during the pandemic? Business Standard looked at some of the available data, and the takeaways were surprising.

A reliable ambulance service is often a luxury in the subcontinent, and it has been so for some time.  

One of the lesser known facts about the death of Mohammed Ali Jinnah is that his ambulance broke down after he landed in Karachi with tuberculosis. The absence of a backup ambulance meant that he reportedly spent two hours on a stretcher outdoors in the oppressive September heat. He died later that day.

Even 70 years later, ambulances have been in short supply during the Covid-19 pandemic. There are also reports of service providers charging exorbitant rates. Surprisingly, an analysis of automobile registration data reveals that the sharp increase in demand hasn’t translated into sales of more emergency vehicles. Ambulance sales dropped after March 2020, when the nation first went into a lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic as seen in chart 1.

The government provides data on vehicles as they are registered. This has tended to move in line with the sales data that the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) puts out. There is some difference in the level of sales and registration. This could be on account of the fact that SIAM’s sales figures are based on vehicles sold to dealers (or wholesale numbers).

Sometimes dealers add to their inventory when it runs low. This is said to have happened in April for example. This would show up in the SIAM data but would not show up in registrations until a retail buyer purchased and registered the vehicle. The gap between sales and registrations has widened in recent times, as can be seen even in the case of passenger vehicles (see chart 2).

Analysts blame lockdowns which make registrations difficult. That said there is a clear slowdown in domestic sales figures, in contrast to exports which have shown year-on-year improvement (see chart 3).

How does this tie into the ambulance figures we spoke about earlier? The lack of domestic demand is something that is ultimately reflected in ambulance sales as well, according to industry officials with whom Business Standard spoke.  Dealerships and road transport offices (RTOs) are shut because of the lockdown. This is one of the key reasons for the sales decline, said a member of Federation of Automobile Dealers Association, the apex body for dealers. An official from a company which makes ambulances said that government orders slowed down after the pandemic.  

So how are people managing pandemic demand?

A lot of existing vans and minibuses that were used to ferry school children or other purposes have been converted into ambulances to meet any urgent requirements, says S P Singh, senior fellow at Indian Foundation Transport Research and Training (IFRT). “At a time like this, no one is questioning whether they meet... quality standards. There are no checks and balances.”  Government-funded charitable trusts, hospitals and nursing homes are the biggest buyers of ambulances. Smaller hospitals also hire them from third parties, said Singh.

And just as auto sales are expected to pick up after cases fall, more ambulances could be on the streets, too, after the pandemic is over.