By Elton Gomes
With up to 39 crimes against women being reported every hour in India, women still do not feel safe in their own backyard. To ensure that Indian women feel safe, the government plans to test panic button in phones once again.
The panic button feature is slated for another round of trials in Uttar Pradesh in May 2018, as reported by the Hindu. In March 2018, the first round of trials were conducted in Uttar Pradesh. The trial was assessed by the Ministries of Women and Child Development (WCD), Home Affairs, and Electronics and Information Technology.
On the basis of our learning from the first round of trial, we will make certain changes to the software and make it more user-friendly. Another trial will be conducted in U.P. in the first week of May,” a senior official from the WCD ministry told the Hindu.
Here’s what happened
In April 2016, the government said that every phone sold from 2017 must include a panic button feature that would allow women to easily access to help in an emergency. The ministry of communications and technology said that an emergency call would be triggered when the user pressed on the number five or nine. The feature would also trigger an emergency call when the power button is pressed three times in a row.
Despite the installation of panic buttons in phones having been delayed due to several reasons, the project was reignited in January 2018.
On January 26, 2018, Union Minister for WCD, Maneka Gandhi said that a pilot to launch the panic button feature will be tested in Uttar Pradesh.
If it works in UP, it can work anywhere, Gandhi said in what was a reference to the high crime rate in Uttar Pradesh. Gandhi added that the project faced an inadvertent delay due to considerable prank calls, as mentioned in a report by the Financial Express.
Chetan Sanghi, joint secretary of the WCD, said that for a person using a basic phone, they only need press a designated key on the phone for the feature to be activated. However, the government is yet to notify which button would act as a panic button, according to media reports.
Sanghi told PTI: Once, a user presses the panic button, five calls will be made to emergency number 112. Following this, five SMSs will be immediately sent to police authorities, and another three to five SMSs will be sent to family members of the victim.”
Why you should care
Although a panic button in smartphones seems like an effective provision, its success will also be dependent on crimes against women first decreasing significantly. The courts and police authorities are already overwhelmed with scores of open or unsolved cases that involve crime against women. The emergency response time across India is also not something to boast about at present.
The government should think about what happens when a person is in distress. A report in Quartz argues that when a person is in distress, the first thing that she or he might do is call out for help. In other words, in the event of an emergency, people might be in too much of a panic to remember pressing a phone button.
According to research cited in Quartz, “the accused in over 80% of rape cases are persons known to the victim.” It then becomes a debatable matter whether smartphones might truly aid women in times of distress. However, in a country with more than one billion mobile subscribers, introducing a safety feature in a mobile might just prove helpful.