PANJIM: Call it technical or promotional? For several months, calls from service providers have been keeping the Goa Police’s Control Room staff busy.
Just imagine the situation, the staff spends most of the time in attending to calls from service providers, which are claimed to be getting diverted due to the technical reasons and this is keeping the emergency callers at bay.
Sources in the police control room informed Herald that on an average daily over 12,000 calls from service providers are been attended to by five staffers and only 200 – 250 calls are from the public.
Sources further informed that these calls are mainly from the mobile companies and DTH service providers, which keep the staff busy thereby putting emergency calls on hold.
“When receiving the calls, we fail to identify the origin of the calls and as such we have to attend to all calls and it’s due to this the general public is facing connectivity issues with us,” a staffer informed.
Sources further stated that this has been happening for many months. There have been enormous complaints from the general public that when they dial 100, they are forced to wait as they cannot get their calls through as on most occasions the line is found engaged.
Due to lack of staff only five units of Control Room are operational.
Besides handling calls on ‘100’ the PCR staff also attends to calls on senior citizen helpline, coastal terror helpline, women & child helpline and police exchange.
Besides the calls from the call centres and service providers, the control room also receives calls from the children, who while playing with their phones, dial the number mistakenly especially in the morning.
The staff feels that the issue of unwanted calls should be sorted out by the department as soon as possible as this will help in serving the public better especially during emergencies.
Superintendent of Police (PCR) Bosco George said that the issue related to unwanted calls would be sorted out immediately. “I feel it is some technical problem but the department will see that it will be sorted on priority,” he said.
