Gitesh Shelke

Pune: “Sir, can you provide me a caller tune from Jane Tu Ya Jane Na and tell me the charges for the service? I am from Yavatmal,” said a caller on Saturday morning. Instead of promptly getting the job done, the person at the other end poured cold water on his hopes. That’s because he had ended up calling the Pune fire brigade control room.

With what has become an irksome regularity, the Pune fire brigade has been fielding 30 such calls per minute over the past few weeks. The control room has four toll-free lines for emergency calls. It’s the same story in Mumbai.

With monsoon setting in, the firemen already have their hands full with complaints of tree collapses and other rain-related emergencies.

“Besides the 65-70 calls a day during monsoon, we get nearly 20 calls asking for phone recharge or bill payment,” says JA Mallik, divisional officer (mobilisation), Mumbai fire brigade.

Sometime even after being told they’ve got the fire brigade number, callers refuse to give up thinking it’s just a line cooked up by an imaginative phone company employee.

“They say tum log hamesha hi aise bolte ho, ab jaldi se caller tune daal ke do. (You guys always say this, now activate the caller tune quickly). It becomes difficult to cope with these calls,” said a Mumbai fire officer, requesting anonymity.

“This is the monsoon season and instead of attending to emergency calls, we have to face such frivolous calls from all over the state,” an irritated fireman VS Salunke told DNA. He along with Nitin Umratkar attends to emergency calls at the Pune fire brigade’s head office.

Umratkar said, “The callers demand information on caller tunes, jokes, SMS services, ring tones and other services. They are mostly from Yavatmal, Solapur, Dhule, Jalgaon, Baramati and Akola districts.”

Station duty officer in Pune GS Pathrudkar said the maximum calls are from Vodafone subscribers.

“When fire brigade personnel tell them they are not mobile service providers, the callers start abusing them,” he said, adding mobile companies have been contacted in this regard.

The fire brigade personnel said the problem was due to the fact that the fire brigade has a three-digit (101) emergency number and Vodafone and Airtel also have toll-free three-digit numbers such as 111 and 121 respectively.

Pathrudkar said that while 11 genuine emergency calls are received on an average day, the number shoots up to about 50 during monsoon due to rain-related incidents. The nuisance caused by mobile phones, however, has taken the number of calls to 30 per minute, with firemen now refusing to attend to the phone lines.

With inputs from Minakshi Sinha in Mumbai

Source : DNA