When in trouble, dialing 15 can make all the difference

Unfortunately, 80% of the calls to Madadgar are made by pranksters, says its manager.

KARACHI:

It’s 8:45am on Saturday morning in Manghopir. Time to wake up. The alarm clock? The piercing cracks of a pistol.

Almost a minute later, a different kind of sound is heard over 12 kilometres away at the Madadgar Call Centre on I I Chundrigar Road. The phone rings. Abdul Sattar is holding fort.

“Two men…they’re bleeding! I saw it happen.”

“Sir, please calm down and tell me exactly where they are.”

Sattar frantically scribbles down details shouted at him by the terrified eyewitness. Once he hangs up, he briskly walks into the dispatch department next door and hands the parchment to another man. A call is made to the Madadgar centre closest to the site of the incident and a team is dispatched. Sattar takes a deep breath. One of the phones at the centre starts to ring again…

This is just one of the 1,500 phone calls that Sattar receives on average each day during his eight hour morning shift. Unfortunately, the lion’s shares of them are prank calls. His 35 colleagues have similar statistics to share, he says with a scowl. “All calls to the 15 helpline are free of charge and you can even reach us through a blocked SIM. Because of this, we’ve become a source of free entertainment for some people.”



SSP Colonel Abdul Wahid Khan, who heads the centre, says that the centre receives a total of 2,400 calls every day, out of which a staggering 80 per cent are prank callers aiming to have a little fun at the expense of people in dire need. “We need some kind of legislation against these people.”

Running the show

A total of 90 operators like Sattar have been employed to run this well-oiled machine round the clock. There are three shifts each day: 40 operators are in the morning one, 30 stay alert during the evening and 20 man the desks at night. The men have been recruited from a pool of Sindh police personnel who have studied up to at least the intermediate level, have no blemishes on their professional records and are tech savvy. To motivate them, cash prizes and certificates are awarded to the operators who are quick on their toes and respond to distress calls efficiently.

How the cogs spin

Feroz Qureshi, who supervises the morning shift at the main centre, says that three modes of communication are used. “We have IP desk phones, a wireless system and 30 landlines to receive information and dispatch it to other centres.”

The other 15 centres in the city - which have one police mobile and four motorcycles each - are working under the watchful eye of the SSPs of the districts they fall under. “The main centre passes on information to the other centres and nearby police stations, which then take action. It takes seven to 10 minutes for a team to reach the site from where the distress call originated,” said Khan, adding that they are trying to reduce the response time to five minutes, even though they are understaffed.

The helpers need help

According to SSP Khan, the finance department has not approved the budget for the helpline as yet and the central police office is funding it. “We have a limited budget and my staffers gets their salaries from the police stations they have been recruited from.” He claims that he has written to the finance department for a separate budget for the centre, but this is pending approval.

“MCC is the face of the police so it should give prompt response and help to the people, if it fails to do this people will not trust police. We give rigorous training to the operators so that they can handle the callers in a good way and do not lose their temper on prank calls.”

A call can make criminals fall

In the first two months of this year, the centre has responded to 8,633 reports of different crimes in the city. The total for all of last year was 63,402 reports. SSP Khan said that last year, the police and Madadgar 15 arrested 1709 thieves and seized 3127 vehicles as well as 195 weapons.

He added that the type of emergency varies by the time of the day: when the sun is shining, the calls are about bodies, kidnapping and accidents. But when dusk approaches, there are more calls about aerial firing and thefts.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 31^st, 2013.