Beside the commissioner’s workplace in Bengaluru lies a management room throughout the partitions of a newly constructed command centre. This can be a place that by no means sleeps. That is Bengaluru’s Emergency Management Room – identified merely as ‘112’ – the place each ring of the telephone could possibly be the beginning of a life-saving rescue, a high-stakes investigation, or generally, a heartbreaking thriller.
As per the information from June 11, 2025, to July 8, 2025, the management room has fielded over 17,000 calls – each acted upon by educated personnel working across the clock in three shifts. The command centre is managed by BVG India, a non-public company contracted by the police.
In accordance with Jyothi T, audit in-charge and coach on the centre, “Eighty-seven per cent of those calls are real emergency-related instances.”
The remaining calls are clean, and even pretend calls which are vulgar in nature, usually focused at ladies responders, she added.
Regardless of the misuse of the service, Jyothi mentioned, the workforce has maintained an “spectacular common response time of simply three seconds to select up a name and below two minutes to dispatch police groups.”
The centre makes use of each auto-dispatch and handbook dispatch methods. The centre coach mentioned that dispatches are all the time based mostly on automobile proximity to the incident location, with automobiles often called Hoysala patrol models being alerted, and responders slicing by means of metropolis visitors to achieve a caller in misery.
Site visitors-related grievances high the checklist of calls which are acquired by the centre. Complaints vary from congestion at key junctions to unruly crowds. Public disturbances and crowd administration instances additionally spike throughout festivals or political occasions.
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Nevertheless, there are extra critical – and generally tragic – calls too. “We get a number of suicide alerts, homicide studies, and lacking individuals instances each week,” mentioned Jyoti.
Not each name is routine, with some remaining etched within the reminiscences of the responders. Describing one such case, Jyoti mentioned, “Throughout Ugadi final 12 months, a 28-year-old lady known as us crying at 2 am. She mentioned her husband was beating her, and her kids had been useless. However then she mentioned, ‘They’re proper in entrance of me, talking to me’.”
“It turned out that the girl was reportedly affected by psychological sickness, and she or he had suffocated her two kids and killed her husband. The kids had been discovered useless in festive garments, including a chilling layer to an already tragic case,” she added.
Even amidst incidents like these, the system stays operational. “We log, assess, and dispatch,” mentioned Jyoti, including that “we will’t afford errors or delays.”
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Along with 112 calls, the centre oversees 7,500 CCTV cameras positioned throughout Bengaluru, all maintained by Honeywell Aerospace Applied sciences. These embrace PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) cameras, HD models, Automated Quantity Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras (876 in quantity), and Facial Recognition System (FRS) cameras (1,500 in quantity).
(Bhoomika Roy Bannerjee is an intern with The Indian Categorical)