One number for all emergencies

The Delhi police will be the first security agency to start a single emergency number —112 — within the next two months. The integrated number will help people reach immediate services of police, ambulance, emergency disaster management and fire department.

According to a senior police officer, Delhi will be the first city where integrated number will start functioning.

Implementation of the emergency number is a part of a pilot project and eventually it will be replicated in other cities in a phase wise manner. Ministry of home affairs (MHA) has cleared the budget estimated for the equipments required to set up the service. “We have agreed with the architecture of the project. We will be the first city to implement — 112. This will run parallel to the existing response systems that are in place — police (100), fire brigade (101), ambulance (102) and emergency disaster management (108),” said a senior Delhi police officer.

Single emergency number ‘112’ would be similar to the ‘911’ all-in-one emergency service in the US. The service will also be accessible even through those SIMs and landlines whose outgoing call facility has been stopped or temporarily suspended.

As per the plan, a person in distress will only need to call 112, thereafter the operator will direct the call to the concerned departments immediately for help. There will be no need to call on individual emergency numbers.

Delhi police is working with MHA and telecom ministry to combine all of these services into one emergency phone number—112. The trial run of the project will begin very soon, following which the existing number may get scrapped after a year of the service getting fully functional. “The existing numbers will not be scrapped till the time 112 helpline matures and becomes popular with people. The 112 number will be initially set up outside police headquarters as existing emergency number 100 operates from there. But when the trial run is completed and the helpline is matured it will be shifted to the headquarters,” he said.

Without giving a timeline, officer said that as numbers like 100, 101 and 102 are popular, so scrapping of these numbers will take time.

“Existing numbers will work in parallel till the time the software of new emergency number 112 gets mature. We will encounter several technical glitches, which will require months of testing to fix,” the officer said.

MHA has identified the vendor for the hardware that will set the control room for 112 number. The Delhi police has estimated a budget of Rs 15 crore for the service. Central agency, Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) and NIC is working on the technical end of the project. “It will be a bigger set-up than the existing control room as the demands of Delhi has grown manifolds. It will not be bigger as technology requires it, but bigger because larger services are required as we need to go to the next level,” the officer said.

A user will be able to communicate even through SMS. The system will learn about the location of the message that will be shared with the nearest help centre.