Ever wondered why the police react sluggishly to emergency calls made to their control room? The reason, it seems, was due to the hundreds of blank calls that the police control room receives every day. A year ago, police officer Shatrujeet Kapur, while posted as the Inspector General (Telecom), made a curious discovery: Every day police control rooms across the 21 districts in Haryana would get hundreds of blank calls exhausting the personnel manning the phones.
In November this year, when he was posted as the commissioner of Faridabad, a district of Haryana adjacent to Delhi, he decided to get to the bottom of the mysterious blank calls, and hopefully, catch a few of the perpetrators. He asked a bunch of engineers from the local BSNL office to investigate the issue and prepare a report.
Most telecom firms, the engineers found, had imported their systems and software, which were configured to automatically route calls made to international emergency phone numbers like 911 (US, Canada) and 112 (Europe) to the local police control room number 100. So if anybody were to begin dialling 911 for
any reason, it would immediately go to 100.
So a subscriber dialling these numbers would inadvertently be routed to the police control leading to hundreds of phone calls. Most customers would end up dialling these numbers while calling up an automated customer-care centre asking them to choose from several options on the menu.
Kapur checked with his batchmates in several other states, who confirmed that their control rooms were also bogged down with hundreds of mysterious blank calls every day. Armed with the data Kapur called a meeting of all the nodal officers of telecom companies on December 2 and asked them to fix their systems.
Most companies ignored his request and the blank calls continued as usual. “I was finally forced to issue show cause notices to their CEOs and COOs on December 19, threatening criminal action. It worked,” Kapur told DNA. Soon, telecom companies like Airtel, Idea, Reliance, Vodafone and Aircel among others, were writing back confirming the system has been fixed.
A district like Faridabad, which receives over 700 blank calls on a daily basis, registered a sharp drop immediately. By December 22, the blank calls had come down to a mere 195 from a peak of 750 just 13 days ago. In the neighbouring district of Gurgaon, the nearly 2,000 blank calls every day stopped. Since Faridabad and Gurgaon come under the Delhi telecom circle, the police in the national capital became unintended beneficiaries of Kapur’s actions.
Similarly, police control rooms across Haryana , Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, which shared telecom circles, also began to register a sharp drop simultaneously. Happy with the results, Kapur is now busy alerting his counterparts across the nation to issue similar show-cause notices to telecom companies in their states to stop these blank calls by fixing their systems locally.
Comments