Bhubaneswar, April 23: Deepak Mohanty, a corporate employee, will always remember the April 3 night when his friend met an accident around 1am near Patia Square.

Seeing his friend bleeding profusely, an apparently helpless Mohanty dialled 108, the toll-free number of the Odisha Emergency Medical Ambulance Service. The ambulance reached the spot within 10 minutes and his friend was rushed to Capital Hospital.

Like Mohanty, many others have also benefitted from the ambulance service, which was launched on March 5 with a response time of 20 minutes for urban areas and 35 minutes for rural areas.

“This is a good initiative. I remember one of my friends having chest pain. We called 108, and the vehicle was there within 15 minutes,” said Hemant Samal, a resident of Rasulgarh.

But, the growing number of fake calls have cast a shadow on the service that has already catered to more than 4,200 patients since April 18.

According to the statistics available from Ziqita Health Care Limited, the private service provider running the ambulances, the 108-ambulance service is in operation in four districts — Khurda, Cuttcak, Puri and Ganjam — with 79 ambulances running.

Sources said that of the 3.6 lakh calls received till April 18, only 4,200 were genuine.

“Only 5 per cent of the calls are genuine. We have received 300 calls from certain numbers with the callers using abusive language. We will approach the state health department to initiate police actions against such callers,” said Sumit Basu, regional head (east) of Ziqita Health Care Limited.

An official at the call centre said another 15,000 calls had been made to know about the service.

He said most of the fake calls were made during day time with the callers asking female executives about their age, marital status and phone numbers.

The centre had received hundreds of calls for help, instances were there when ambulances returned from the spot after finding no one. Fake calls at times even delay the taking of genuine calls.

“As many as 40 calls can be made at a time to the call centre. But when such a large number of fake calls keep coming, genuine callers have to wait for the line to be free,” said another official.

Another concern is wastage of time when an ambulance takes time to reach the spot after getting a fake call. “One ambulance is there for every one lakh population. It operates within a radius of 25km to 30km. But, once an ambulance is dispatched following a hoax call, attending to a genuine caller’s needs gets delayed,” he said.