Bengaluru city will have 51 “Pink Hoysala” vehicles to patrol the streets for the safety of women and children starting Monday, The Hindu reported. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will flag off the service from Vidhana Soudha.

The team will provide quick assistance to women and children in distress upon receiving complaints through the “Suraksha App” or police control room number 100. After downloading the mobile application, the user needs to press the power button five times to send out a distress call, which will then be sent to the nearest pink Hoysala. The user will be tracked with the help of live vehicle tracking system in the vehicle. An alert will be sent to the nearest police station as well. The application is available on both Android and iOS platforms.

The local administration will deploy pink Hoysalas with three women staff in each at sensitive locations in the city. “Stationing Pink hoysalas at such locations will also provide moral supports to the women,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (command centre) B Nagendra Kumar.

The administration has decided to have women police officers in he vehicles only during the day because of shortage of staff. “We are recruiting more personnel and once we have adequate numbers, we will have women personnel on 24X7 basis in pink Hoysalas,” City police commissioner Praveen Sood told Bangalore Mirror.

According to The Hindu, 5,630 women and children have already downloaded the application. The police have 221 Hoysala vehicles for general patrolling at present, reported The New Indian Express.

On the night of December 31, hundreds of women faced street harassment in the city. A report in the Bangalore Mirror had claimed that large groups of “unruly men” mobbed the popular MG Road and Brigade Road areas on Sunday night, “pawing, molesting and passing lewd remarks on women on the street,” even though 1,500 police personnel had been deployed there. There have been several other instances of abuse of women in the city in recent months.