Jan. 30: The city police helpline — “Dial 100” — is meant for seeking police help during distress, but many are dialling the number and asking how to set the mobile phone caller tunes, hello tunes and get recharge vouchers.

Eighty percent of the calls received by the police control room since its launch in March last year are prank calls and many have been found to be dialling the number to annoy the men in khaki.

“The purpose of launching the helpline is to help people in distress 24 hours, but unfortunately 80 per cent of the calls we receive are prank calls. People have been found calling up the control room at night and asking for how to set mobile phone caller tunes or about recharge vouchers. In many cases, people argue with the police, use expletives and annoy them. Most of the prank calls are from outside the city,” a source in the control room told The Telegraph today.

Chief minister Tarun Gogoi had launched the police helpline in March last year and the control room has received 1,97,560 calls till January 20 this year.

However, only 6 per cent of the callers were found to be using the helpline seeking help from the police or reporting an incident. The remaining 14 per cent calls have been made seeking phone numbers or any other information related to the police.

Once a caller dial 100 reporting about an incident or seeking the help of the police, address of the caller can be seen by the control room on a computer screen and they rush in a police van nearest to the spot of the incident.

There are 22 police patrol vans in the city and the control room can keep track on them through global positioning system.

They have also prepared a geographic information system map of 450 square kilometre area of the city and can locate the area of the incident by the click of a mouse.

The control room has reported and attended a total of 1,953 incidents and provided the police help in an average time of 11.59 minutes.

They have also averted serious criminal incidents like rape, attempted murder, robbery, theft, public nuisance, among others.

“Apart from calls from the city, we have also helped people seeking our help from other districts and we informed the local police stations and helped them. On January 3, a girl from Chirang district had dialled our number, asking how to commit suicide. We immediately tracked her number and informed Dhaligaon police station and they rushed to the house and stopped the girl from ending her life. We are ready to help the people any time, but we want to request them not to misuse the number and annoy us,” the official said.

In order to reduce the number of prank calls, the control room is now trying to block the numbers from where it received such calls frequently to disturb the cops.

“We have identified some numbers from where we get frequent prank calls and those will be blocked soon. We can also take action against those making prank calls, but in many cases it has been found that callers were using SIM cards in other’s name,” the official said.