Police's SOS app for women fails to click

NEW DELHI: While the threat to women's safety in the capital remains high, police seem to have failed to reassure Delhi's female population that its Himmat mobile application can be a solution to their emergency needs. Designed by Delhi Police as an SOS system a little over a year ago, it only received 123 actionable complaints in 2015 and 36 this year, according to an RTI query.Cops now agree with women users that the process to make an SOS call on the app takes longer than contacting a person during such an emergency .
Police officers say that initially more than 6,000 users had downloaded the app, but it appears now that this was mostly out of curiosity . In a reply to an RTI query filed by activist Ved Pal, a resident of south Delhi, police claimed that all the complaints received through Himmat were resolved, and yet the app had lost its sheen.
“Immediately after the launch of the app, the cops received 3,416 complaints, of which only 45 were found to be genuine,“ revealed Ved Pal.“Police said women initially used the application to check if it worked. A few months later, however, women realised it was easier to call their relatives or even the police in times of trouble rather than log into Himmat.“
The app, downloadable from the Delhi Police website, requires users to enter two mobile numbers for use during emergencies. A person in distress can press the power button or simply shake the phone to send an SOS to the central police control room.Using advanced technology , the app captures audio and video from the environment of the person in distress and transmits the same to the control room. An SMS alert is transmitted by the control room to patrol cars in the area concerned as well as to the local station house officer through the Delhi Police Cyber Highway .
However, women are irked by the time-consuming process to register themselves on the app. “Women also complain that the app's browser often turned non-responsive when clicked several times during a panic situation,“ said Ved Pal. “Moreover, the app tended to stall frequently when downloaded on cheaper smart phones with slow processors.“
In reply to another query cops said that they had only received five complaints on the Hike messenger number that was introduced in 2015 and one in 2016. In contrast Delhi Police's women's helpline (1091) -which has six channels to receive calls and one to respond to them as well as six operators handling the calls -received 933 distress calls in 2015 and 471 till date this year.