Mobile phones to have panic button from Jan, Delhi traffic cops tell court

India will be one of the first countries to have mandated this safety feature where the high rate of crime against women has been a cause of concern in recent years.

To help women in distress, from January 2017 onwards every mobile phone sold in India will have a ‘panic button’ that could be used to quickly alert the police, Delhi Police told the Delhi High Court on Wednesday.

India will be one of the first countries to have mandated this safety feature where the high rate of crime against women has been a cause of concern in recent years.(Hindustan Times)

India will be one of the first countries to have mandated this safety feature where the high rate of crime against women has been a cause of concern in recent years.

The National Crime Records Bureau said there were 3,27,394 reports of crimes against women in the country last year, including rape, molestation, abduction, kidnapping and cruelty. There were 34,651 reports of rape from all over India out of which Delhi alone reported 2,199 cases.

The Delhi Police’s submission before a bench of Justice BD Ahmed and Justice Ashutosh Kumar came during hearing on a public interest litigation initiated by the court for women’s safety and recruitment of additional police in the Capital after the December 16, 2012 gang-rape case.

Assisting the court in the case as amicus curiae, advocate Meera Bhatia quoted the Delhi Police’s affidavit saying that the panic button will be introduced from January 1 next year.

The panic button will be mapped to emergency number ‘100’.

There are plans to do away with all existing emergency number such as 100, 101, 102 and 108 and introduce a single emergency number 112. Till that time all emergency numbers will be treated as secondary numbers and will be re-routed to 100 for a period of one year.

In April this year, the department of telecommunications had notified the rules on panic button. Under these rules, all feature phones will have the facility of panic button configured to the numeric key 5 or 9 and all smartphones will have the panic button configured to three times short pressing of the on-off button.

The rules said that with effect from January 1, 2018 all mobile phones will be required to have the facility of identifying the location through satellite-based GPS.

During the brief hearing, member secretary of the Delhi State Legal Service Authority Dharmesh Sharma described as “unsavoury” the manner in which the biology or chemical samples are stored in the police station (malkhanas) immediately after collection from the crime scenes.

The samples are kept in the malkhanas till they are deposited with the Forensic Science Laboratories.

Sharma was asked by the court to carry out the inspection across the police station in Delhi to gauge the ground reality with regard to the manner and procedure adopted by police during the crime investigation process.

The court has posted the matter for further hearing on November 23.