india

Updated: Jan 11, 2019 11:12 IST

“Aunty, we are all alone at home and my elder brother is not allowing me to change the television channel” and “Please help me spot the mosquitoes in my house,” etc.

Wondering what is this?

Don’t be surprised. These and many other weird and funny calls haunt the UP Police’s emergency response centre UP100 quite frequently.

Interestingly, the centre’s outsourced and well trained call attendants don’t bang the phone on such callers. They politely suggest ways that may come handy in such situations but also warn the callers not to come up with such flimsy issues again or they would face action.

“The children’s TV channel dispute landed at UP100 call centre in October 2018 from Balrampur district. In this instance, the UP100 police response vehicle of that district rushed to the spot believing the children may enter into a scuffle and harm each other but they found that two brothers, 7 and 10 years’ old, were arguing over changing the television channel. The PRV personnel politely resolved the issues and informed the children’s parents about it,” says Mohd Imran, SP of UP100.

He said a warning was also issued to the caller who sought assistance in searching mosquitoes in his house in Ballia for wasting the UP100 call attendants’ time and also engaging the emergency phone lines.

Imran said another caller from Bulandshahr dialled UP100 on December 5, 2018 to inform that a man had climb a high tension electricity pole and was threatening to end life because his wife had gone to her parents’ house. He said the PRV staff immediately contacted the electricity department to shut down the power supply to avert any untoward incident and then got the man to down.

The SP said another weird call landed at UP100 from Balrampur on January 2, 2019 in which a villager informed that his neighbour had damaged an eye of his goat. He said the dispute was sorted out with the PRV staff intervention when the neighbour agreed to get the goat treated properly by a veterinary doctor. “Many calls of husband-wife fights land regularly at UP100 in which several time the wives complain of being beaten up by the husbands. Sometimes, the situation is reverse. There are times where husbands call up complaining about wife not cooking food or making morning tea,” the SP quipped.

He said similarly multiple weird calls were reported to UP100 but not all calls find a solution. “Take for instance the case of a caller who sought help when a monkey slapped him inside a temple premises in October 2017. Although the call attendants are trained to patiently tackle such calls, they are at their wit’s end when callers seek help in making their naughty kids sleep -- the other day a caller from a rural area told the attendant that his child is continuously crying in the absence of his wife. The caller said the child is scared of the police and will sleep if any cop or a police vehicle comes calling,” the SP said.