Mohit (name changed), a student at RIMS, Ranchi, had complained to the anti-ragging hotline in July 2009 but it never acted. His father had to “get in touch with the institute authorities to save my son”

Manas (name changed), a student of NIT Jamshedpur, had lodged a similar complaint but nothing happened

New Delhi, Oct. 15: If a college fresher needs to lodge a complaint with the country’s 24x7 anti-ragging helpline, he had better be one-in-three thousand lucky.

That’s the proportion of complaints to the UGC’s anti-ragging call centre that are registered or forwarded for action, the National Human Rights Commission has found.

It has also found that there is sometimes a 24 to 48 hour delay when a complaint is indeed forwarded from the helpline to the educational institution’s anti-ragging squad or local police. The rights commission made these discoveries while probing the death of a student, allegedly because of ragging, in Ghaziabad last year.

According to its findings, the call centre received 2,445,575 complaints between its inception on June 15, 2009, and March 18, 2011 — the rate of over 1 lakh complaints a month underlining the extent of the problem in the country. Of these, only 839 were registered and 810 forwarded for action.

The call centre told the commission that the rest of the complaints were mere “queries”.

When The Telegraph rang the call centre today, a senior customer service representative declined to give the contact number of any official of CARETEL Infotech Ltd, which runs the helpline. He said many of the calls the helpline receives are “prank calls and test calls”, and claimed that all complaints are forwarded to the institutions and police stations.

The commission was probing the death of Abhishek Sahai, whose body was found on August 15 last year at the SRM Institute of Engineering and Management in Modinagar, Ghaziabad. Sahai had allegedly been ragged on August 13 and 14 before being pushed off the hostel’s third floor.

Two complaints had been sent from the email account of one Tara Saini about the ragging, the first at 9.35pm on August 13 and the other at 8.41pm the following day. The call centre forwarded the first complaint to the police only at 2.43pm on August 14, after a 17-hour delay, the commission has found. The second complaint was never forwarded.

The commission report says it is unconvinced by the call-centre officials’ claim that they had tried and failed to contact the station house officer and the special superintendent of police on their mobile and landline numbers. The commission also found that SRM had not set up the mandatory anti-ragging squad.

The commission’s report has been handed to the human resource development ministry and the UGC, but no decision has been taken on follow-up action.

The helpline is the result of a May 8, 2009, Supreme Court directive to the government to implement anti-ragging measures. The court suggested a plan with four components: a call centre with a hotline, a database on colleges, an independent monitoring agency, and a database on students.

“What the HRD ministry and the UGC have done is just eyewash,” said Raj Kachroo, whose son Aman had died of alleged ragging in a Himachal Pradesh college in 2009.