Hello! Customer care? Mera phone ka balance zero bata raha hai, please check karke bataiyein. Mera recharge nahi le raha hai… The complaint is genuine. Only that the man receiving it isn’t a customer care executive.

A police station in Koderma district is swamped by more than 100 calls a day on a particular BSNL line — 06534-252228 — which was primarily installed to register complaints, albeit of a different nature.

The closest the calls get to anything concerned with law and order is when the caller wishes to speak to an officer in charge of some Bihar thana.

Arun Kumar, a clerk at Koderma police station in the district, conceded that they were in a dilemma every time the phone rang. “We just have one question in mind — whether to take the call or not. Imagine our frustration when somebody wants us to repair a fridge or a television set or some electronic gadget. On an average we receive 100 such calls a day. Sometime, it is crazier. There seems to be no respite. We attended to dozens of call on Friday too,” he told The Telegraph.

He added that a handful of the calls were for the officer in charge, but of some other police stations in Jharkhand and Bihar.

Officer in charge Ranjan Kumar Choudhary too admitted the problem, but said that they had no choice other than attending to every call. “What if there is an emergency somewhere or someone has an important message. We cannot ignore a single call even if it hampers our work. If we do, people with genuine complaints will suffer,” he said.

Choudhary added that he had urged Koderma superintendent of police Shambhu Thakur as well as BSNL assistant engineer Madan Gopal Prasad to rectify the snag that was leading to such frequent cross-connections at the police station.

Engineer Prasad told The Telegraph that they were looking into the matter and had installed a caller identification device on Friday to know where the calls were coming from. “Once we can trace the same, the fault will be rectified without delay,” he said.

Now, all the policemen at Koderma can do is hope that the BSNL’s promise doesn’t ring hollow.