Most calls to emergency helpline stem from curiosity

In the three months since the launch of the national emergency helpline, nearly 70 percent of the calls received have been from people curious about the new service.

The National Emergency Service (999) was started last October by the Information and Communication Technology Division.

According to available data, more than 900,000 of the 1,300,353 calls to the helpline were made out of curiosity.

The remaining 399,268 calls tried to make use of the service.

Sixty-eight percent of these service-seeking calls were made for police service, 27 percent for fire service and the remaining 5 percent for health services and ambulances.

Fire services responded in 2,166 cases, police in 955 cases and 118 in other cases.

Information services, such as the addresses of police stations and hospitals, were provided to those making the remaining 389,000 calls.

Eleven percent of the calls were made by women.

Forty-seven percent of the calls were made from Dhaka, 11 percent were made from Gazipur.

The emergency helpline call centre currently employs 100 employees. Twenty-five employees work on each shift. The call centres are open 24-hours a day.

“The Sheikh Hasina administration has a 24-hour commitment to the 160 million citizens of Bangladesh,” State Minister for Information and Communication Technology Junaid Ahmed Palak told bdnews24.com. “The 999 National Help Desk service was launched to help the people and provide easy access to public services.”

“We are researching and investigating new ways to develop and modernise this service. The data obtained from our research and the advice of our stakeholders will be used to implement new policies with the consent of our prime minister and her ICT advisor.”

The National Help Desk was launched as a pilot project on Oct 11 to provide access to police, firefighting and ambulance services to the public through information and communication technology.

The project is run with the help of Bangladesh Police, the Bangladesh Fire Service and Civil Defence Department, the Health Department’s Ambulance Service and NGO Plus One.

Aside from emergency services, the project also aims to provide information services on a variety of topics.

Such services are also available on the 999 National Help Desk website and mobile app.

The ICT Department hopes the service will function as a one-stop window for citizens on information and services.

The project also aims to raise awareness of emergency and general services.

The 999 mobile app has been downloaded 30,000 times. The app can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/2fqnhey