Mumbai police to set up hold tones for control room

The Mumbai police is considering introducing a hold tone for its entire emergency calling system including the control room number, so that callers don’t get a busy tone or have their calls go unanswered.

A senior officer in the Mumbai police said that the plan is almost ready and would be implemented soon. The hold tone will first be used in the women’s 24x7 helpline number — 103.

“This move is nearly ready and is just waiting for some final touches to be implemented. We will first try it on the women’s helpline and then start it for 1098 and also 100,” said an officer.

“The helpline numbers are on some days very busy with constant calls. At such a time, a call bounces off our various lines to see which line is open to receive calls. If no line is open, then the call either goes unanswered or the caller gets a busy tone and it gets disconnected,” he added.

The control room, which deals with the calls made to 100, gets between 8,000-9,000 calls per day. These range from asking for addresses of police station to phone numbers of officers. The Asian Age had previously reported how 2016 has already seen 56 hoax calls received till May.

“The current system has no way of letting a caller know that the operators are busy. We had been thinking of ways to change this. So we decided to introduce a tone, which will inform the callers that their calls will be answered in a short while,” said the officer.