Delhi police says sorry to judge after his call to 100 goes unanswered
New Delhi: The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and Delhi Police today told Delhi High Court that "inconvenience" caused to Justice Vipin Sanghi, whose calls to the emergency helpline number 100 went unanswered, was "inadvertent" and due to reasons beyond their control, including congestion in the systems of telephone service providers.
The MHA and the police conveyed to a bench of Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Sangita Dhingra Sehgal that they have taken several steps to streamline the system of emergency helpline system '100' and make it more efficient.
"Delhi Police has further submitted that the inconvenience caused to Justice Vipin Sanghi (a judge of Delhi High Court) was inadvertent and due to reasons beyond their control and it is assured that all sincere steps are being taken to ensure that such incidents do not recur in future," MHA said.
In its affidavit filed through the central government's standing counsel Anil Soni, the ministry said that to tackle the problem of calls queuing up at the telecom service provider and MTNL, "the matter regarding priority routing of emergency calls has been taken up with authorities concerned. Ministry of Communication and IT, Department of Telecommunication has taken up the matter with all access service providers".
Giving the details of steps taken to handle the problem, the ministry said the manpower resources deployed for managing emergency response system has been further harmonised to keep in tune with the overall workload and changing call pattern.
Delhi Police also filed its affidavit in which it said that heavy traffic on telecom service provider (TSP) leads to congestion in their systems as a result of which few calls do not reach Central Police Control Room (CPCR) exchange and get abandoned at the end of TSP.
"This creates the impression to the distress caller as if the call has not been attended by PA-100 call taker whereas actually the call has not landed at CPCR," it said.
Regretting the inconvenience caused to Justice Sanghi, who had called the emergency helpline number when he was stuck in a traffic jam here on April 29 this year, the police said at that time there was a heavy rush of calls due to which the call made by the judge could not be attended.
The bench has now fixed the matter for hearing on August 29.
