The gangrape of two women on a highway in Bulandshahr in July, and the death of three people in violence in Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh earlier this month, exposed the poor condition of the state’s police emergency response system. This seems to have spurred efforts by the state government to set up an integrated control room along the lines of the one that operates in Delhi.
In the Bulandshahr incident, the police control room failed to pick up the family’s frantic calls to the police assistance number, 100, for about 15 minutes, while in Bijnore, the victims’ relatives could not reach the police despite dialling the emergency number several times.
Under the proposed integrated Dial-100 system, which is expected to be set up in Lucknow by October 20, all distress calls will be received at a centralised control room in the state capital from where they will be forwarded for further action. Senior police officials in the state say that the new system is expected to bring about more accountability.
Though such a system is the need of the hour in the sprawling state, Uttar Pradesh could do well to learn from the lessons of Delhi, which has a similar emergency response system in place for a much smaller area, but is battling a unique set of challenges. In fact, the Delhi Police was recently pulled up by a Delhi High Court judge for not answering a distress call.
Greater efficiency
At present, the 75-odd police districts in Uttar Pradesh have their own police control rooms with about four to eight staffers working on each eight-hour shift. The state’s bigger cities of Lucknow, Allahabad, Kanpur, Noida and Ghaziabad have between 50 to 60 personnel handling distress calls in each shift.
Uttar Pradesh Police spokesperson Rahul Srivastav said that the management of the new integrated system has been outsourced to a private company, and at least 300 people were expected to field calls for this service every day.
Elaborating on how the new system will help the Uttar Pradesh police respond to distress calls more efficiently, Daljeet Chaudhry, Additional Director General (law & order), said that the new system is expected to ensure that police teams reach the point of distress within 15 minutes of the call in urban areas, and 20 minutes in rural areas. He added that it would also enable police teams to coordinate better in case reinforcements were required in difficult situations.
Chaudhry added that the plan was to bring 3,200 police vehicles linked to the integrated service on the road. “The first batch of 700 vehicles will be launched with the service,” he said. “Subsequent batches will be launched in the coming weeks till we reach our target.”
Potential challenges
As Uttar Pradesh prepares to improve its response to distress calls, it could learn from the experience of the Delhi Police, which already has a similar mechanism in place, but is battling a few challenges. These include insufficient personnel and the lack of dedicated bandwidth for the Dial 100 service.
In May, when a judge of the Delhi High Court dialled 100 and did not get a response, he wrote to the Delhi police commissioner to complain. The complaint was later treated as a Public Interest Litigation and Delhi Police was asked for an explanation to which it said that the judge’s call was not answered for reasons beyond the police’s control.
SK Singh, additional Deputy Commissioner of Delhi Police (operations), said that the widespread perception that people often do not get a response to distress calls made to the police helpline could be due to the fact that sometimes many of those calls do not reach the police control room due to network congestion, which is out of the control of the police.
This, he said, was likely to continue as long as calls on the Police Assistance-100 route were perceived as ordinary calls by the base transmitting stations of telecom companies, and rejected if the stations were handling too many calls at that moment.
“In our affidavit to the high court, we specifically mentioned that PA-100 should be treated as a priority service and that it should be given a dedicated bandwidth,” said Singh.
Asked about the estimated number of calls missed by the control room due to network issues, Singh said that it was near-impossible to ascertain this as calls that are not entertained by the base transmitting stations due to congestion are not registered anywhere.
Lessons from Delhi Police
Despite these limitations, Delhi Police follows a procedure to ensure that police control rooms respond to distress calls promptly.
In the national capital, every 15 minutes, the police control room prepares an analysis sheet on the basis of the total time taken to pick up a call. Those that take over 10 minutes to respond to are highlighted in yellow, and later reported to a police officer who is in charge of the emergency police response service.
“The reason for the delayed response has to be found out to ensure that such mistakes do not happen again,” said an officer, referring to the case of the High Court judge.
Following the judge’s complaint, said Singh, the Delhi Police instituted a new rule that every dropped and disconnected call to the number 100 will be cross-checked by the control room with an operator returning the call to check if everything was ok.
A senior control room officer, who did not want to be identified, said that the period between 9.45 pm and 10 pm is the busiest – with the majority of calls related to quarrels and nuisance by drunken men. A large part of the analysis sheet corresponding to this period is marked in yellow because of the long time taken to answer these calls.
The 50-odd responders manning the phones in the Delhi police control room attend to 500 calls on an average in these 15 minutes. Thus each operator has to serve at least 10 callers in 15 minutes. This was a tough task, said the officer, adding that a solution for this needed to be found.
While Delhi Police uses the services of Mahanagar Telecom Nigam Limited, their counterparts in Uttar Pradesh have tied-up with two private telecom companies.
When asked about the inevitable technical challenges that the Uttar Pradesh police may also face once its integrated police emergency assistance system kicks off, Rahul Srivastav said that telecom companies had a big role to play in this, and efforts were being made to strengthen the telecom network in rural areas.