With Namma 100, city gets most advanced emergency service

Bengaluru on Saturday became the first Indian city to have an advanced 24/7 emergency service with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah launching the scaled-up Namma 100 (Nimma Dooru Namma Nooru) facility that aims to respond to callers in just six seconds.

Inaugurating the service, the chief minister asked the police to bring about qualitative, positive and visible changes in policing for public safety.

“The World Economic Forum has labelled Bengaluru the most dynamic city in the world. Bengaluru has a population of about 1.1 crore and a floating population of 30 lakh. The government has generously released funds for modernising the Bengaluru police. State-of-the-art equipment and gadgets have been provided. Police should effectively use all these and ensure qualitative, positive and visible changes for public safety,” he said.

Siddaramaiah emphasised that neither the colour of Hoysala patrol cars nor having advanced gadgets was important. “The very purpose of any initiative won’t be served if police don’t become proactive. They should be people friendly and help those in distress,” he said.

He asked the police to make Bengaluru free from anti-social elements and habitual criminals, and instructed the DG&IGP, Rupak Kumar Dutta, to expand the Namma 100 service to all police commissionerates in Karnataka.

More facilities soon
Namma 100 has a multilingual desk to take calls in languages other than Kannada to reflect Bengaluru’s cosmopolitan culture. Besides, it will cater to different services from next week onwards.

People can dial 1 for police, 2 for traffic and 3 for enquiries and appointments.

Police have acknowledged the difficulty people face in visiting the jurisdictional police station for various errands. Now, there is a solution for them.

They can just call the communications officer (call receiver) by dialling 3 and schedule an appointment with the official concerned.

The communications officer will contact the official concerned, schedule an appointment and get back to the caller. This will help people avoid waiting at police stations.

On a par with British service
Around four months ago, Home Minister G Parameshwara and five senior officers, including Bengaluru Police Commissioner Praveen Sood, visited London to study the practices followed by the Scotland Yard. Britain’s emergency service, 999, with its low response time, impressed them. The service has 1,700 call receivers with a response time of five seconds and takes less than 12 minutes to rush an officer to the spot.
The Bengaluru police decided to emulate the British service. Accordingly, the response time has been fixed at 15 seconds while police will reach the spot in 15 minutes. At present, the response time is six seconds and the time to reach the spot 18 minutes, Sood said.
The service received 400 calls when it was launched on an experimental basis a few days ago. Presently, the number of calls per day is 3,000, while the service can handle 8,000 calls per day.