Soon, Master Control Room to handle all emergency calls

The new master control room will function as the single handling centre for calls landing on ‘100’, women’s helpline, Child Line, senior citizen’s help line and also traffic control from all over the state, that is even if a person dials ‘100’, the call will be processed at the MCR at the old commissionerate in Chennai. 

Police officials say the MCR can help them get rid of duplication of work, as complainants often call on multiple helplines. In addition to the ‘100’, public will get one more emergency number ‘112’. 

“All emergency calls would land at the MCR and the same team will be handling all of them. So there will be better co-ordination and the staff can identify same caller calling on different helplines. This will help the team to direct the personnel concerned to attend to the issue,” a senior police official told DTNext.

Some officials feel that the response time may be delayed when calls from across the state are directed to a single centre in Chennai. “The control room staff do not alert the nearest patrol vehicle when they receive a call. They will first identify the police district and then the police station concerned after entering the details of the caller and nature of his/her complaint. The message is then sent to the police station concerned after which the nearest patrolling vehicle will be alerted,” another official said. 

“When the MCR was set up at new office of the police commissioner, similar promises were made. But half of the promises remained on paper. The control room was supposed to have an integrated CCTV system, monitoring the traffic junctions in the city, by receiving live feed through optical fibre network. The system never took off and a few cameras that were installed, were now lying idle due to poor maintenance,” a police official said. 

When the MCR comes up at Rs 13 crore, the existing control room at Chennai CoP office will be rendered useless. The existing control room was opened in 2013 and the investment made on this will go waste, a few officers lamented.