KARACHI, June 3: Catering to a population of 16 million, the Karachi police helpline, better known as Madadgar Call Centre (MCC), is working with only 40 telephone lines.
People in distress experience hardship in getting through to the police helpline as most of the time the telephone lines remain engaged.
However, at the same time the helpline is misused by callers who waste the precious time of the call centre staff, causing considerable inconvenience to people in distress who desperately dial the 15 helpline number, said a police officer.
The problem has come to the fore especially since the police helpline has been centralized into the MCC from its previous setup, where 14 Madadgar centres were situated in different towns across the city.
At the new centralized helpline centre, situated near the DIG South office, 40 telephone lines are operational. Officials said the centralized 15 had capacity for more telephone lines.
The previous Madadgar 15 centres were located in Saddar, Jamshed, Malir, Liaquatabad, Gulberg, Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Landhi, Keamari, Korangi, Lyari, Baldia, Clifton, North Nazimabad and Site.
The 14 centres had a total of 63 telephones lines in the defunct setup.
Sources said that at present the new setup has 17 telephone lines fewer than the previous one. In the previous setup of decentralized Madargar 15, calls used to get connected to far off places. For instance, if a distress call was being made from Korangi, it could get through to the North Nazimabad centre.
One of the main considerations for switching to the new centralized setup was to save the response time in attending the distress call, which was wasted in the old system.
If telephone lines remain engaged when the caller makes a distress call, the rationale behind the transformation will be defeated, said a police officer privy to the fact that currently the helpline remains constantly engaged.
Recently the command of the Mohafiz force and Madadgar 15 was integrated under one officer, but the new facilities envisaged for the response unit still seems a distant dream.
Once a distress call is received at the MCC, the information would be passed on to the nearest police unit, which could be a police station or a police mobile. However, the option of locating the nearest police mobile for the task seems a distant reality as the idea of installing trackers in the police mobiles has been dropped, the sources said.
The previous provincial police officer had grand plans for the integration of Madadgar 15 and Mohafiz. According to his plans, each mobile of the Mohafiz force was supposed to be equipped with a tracker system so that its position would be visible through a digital map in the centralized call centre. However, according to well-placed sources, the idea of installing trackers has been dropped because of financial constraints.
The chief of the Citizens Police Liaison Committee, Sharfuddin Memon, said that the centralized Madadgar 15 should be equipped with at least 100 telephone lines. He was of the view that the call centre should be equipped with the identification software which would indicate the address and identification of the incoming call. He said that at the CPLC this software was operational.
He said the facility of recently installed cameras by the city district government should be extended to police, who could play their role in better policing in the respective area.
