Bengaluru: 98% calls to police control room end at IVRS stage

BENGALURU: The command centre of Bengaluru city police has been receiving on average 2.3 lakh calls a day this year. While just about 725 calls are actionable, requiring police follow up, around thrice this number — 2,523— are blank calls and 1,962 are enquiry ones. The rest, nearly 98%, are those that are disconnected at the IVRS stage itself.
According to city police records accessed by TOI, 6,35,84,574 calls were received by the command centre between January 1 and September 30 this year.Of them, 1,95,831 were actionable in nature, while 5,35,489 were just enquiry calls and 6,81,300 were blank calls. The remaining 6,21,71,954 calls were disconnected at Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) stage.
Calls terminated at the IVRS stage are certainly indicative of the hiccups in the emergency response system, admit police. “If a person is kidnapped and has little time to contact the police control room, the IVRS is a hindrance and the purpose of police emergency number is defeated,” said K Ramarajan, deputy commissioner of police at the command centre.
Ramarajan, however, said most calls got disconnected at the IVRS stage because of mobile phones being kept in pockets. He explained that at such times if the home button or power button gets pressed thrice, the call automatically gets connected to the police control room and the IVRS is activated.
According to Ramarajan, the auto-generated voice asks a caller to choose the service he or she needs. The choices are police assistance, traffic assistance, cybercrime and enquiry. This takes 20 seconds at least and if there is no response in the next 4-5 seconds, the call automatically gets disconnected.
Also, many a time, children or seniors, not knowing about the facility, press those buttons more than three times, thus connecting to the police control room, he added.
A city-based activist has already approached the Karnataka high court seeking a ban on IVRS, saying it consumes more time and those in distress or panic cannot handle it effectively.
According to Ramarajan, the police control room should be equipped with a facility similar to ambulance services (108) and fire and emergency services (101).
“In these two services, the caller can directly converse with the staffers and get desired assistance. By removing IVRS from police control room numbers, this can be achieved,” he said.
The bigger worry, say police, is blank calls. “They block genuine callers in distress and seeking police intervention,” he said.
“If a person disconnects the call after responding to IVRS, or does not receive the call or respond when we call the same number again, it is treated as a blank call,” Ramarajan explained.
At present, 50 tele-callers work in one shift, handling 180 lines at a time. In future, the lines will be increased to 360, said police.