At a time when the police are making efforts to use online forums to ensure connectivity with citizens, the police emergency number – 100 is inaccessible to many citizens in distress.
‘100’, popularised as the go-to emergency police number seems to be of little help, as in most cases, the line is inaccessible and fails to connect from either mobile phones or landline. The efforts of The Hindu to get through to 100 also went in vain. Ramya V. (name changed), a resident of Malleswaram, complained that she had not been able to get the connection to the emergency helpline despite trying several times a few days ago. Due to a large commotion near her house, she picked up her mobile phone and dialled 100. “When I tried calling the number, it did not connect. I asked my husband to try and even he couldn’t get through. Since we don't have a landline number, we asked our friend to make the call from his landline,” she said.
The call from a landline luckily worked that night. However, there have been other complaints where calls made from landline connections have also been unable to connect to the emergency helpline. When they are lucky to get through, citizens complain that there is no response to calls. A resident of Banashankari said that he has tried calling the emergency number many times and the response was particularly bad at night. “If there is a serious situation and we cannot get through to the police control room, how do we manage? The only other option is to go online and check out jurisdictional police station numbers and try calling them. But there is no point in having the emergency number if we do not get immediate response,” he said.
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City Police Commissioner M.N. Reddi acknowledged that there was a technical snag with the police control room number and said that the problem was being addressed. He requested citizens in distress to call the alternate number 22942222 or post any issue on his Twitter handle, till the line is fixed.