It has often been seen in the advanced cities of the world that a separate passage is provided for ambulances and fire brigades for helping them to reach to their destined places urgently i.e hospitals and to extinguish fire to save precious human lives of patients and of those who fall prey to any serious misfortune. The users of buses, cars, motorcycles, etc are strictly prohibited to use such allocated passages. In our country, unfortunately, there is no concept of allocating separate passage for ambulances and fire brigades. They use the same lanes and passages that are used by other vehicles such as buses, cars, rickshaws, etc. And these lanes, more often than not, remain busy or jammed. Resultantly, such emergency vehicles fail to reach to their destined places in time. Adding fuel to the fire, we show callousness of the worst type when we dont allow an emergency vehicle to overtake or pass easily knowing the basic fact that it is blowing the emergency siren. This apathy on the part of the general public results in the loss of precious human lives which, otherwise, can easily be saved with the provision of separate passages and with a little bit of civic sense. I would, therefore, request the government to allocate separate passages on our roads for ambulances and fire brigades so that they are able to reach their destined places urgently within the shortest possible time and help in saving precious human lives. ABDUL SAMAD SAMO, Karachi, February 21.