Painted red, the panic button is an important safety feature in vehicles used to carry passengers. Mandated by a notification after a passenger was raped by an Uber driver in New Delhi, this button, which is to be installed in all commercial passenger vehicles – taxis and buses – should alert the police, even when the passenger is on his way to access. or cannot operate. To make smartphone emergency calls or use in-app security features.
But nearly eight years after the rape, these panic buttons may not be of much use, at least in the national capital which has around 11,000 vehicles.
An example of this difference between regulation and practice is Uber’s own infrastructure. Indian Express Did 50 Uber rides in Delhi in a month and 48 of them did not get a working panic button.
Instead, it found a monitoring system riddled with glitches – including an unresolved software “integration issue” that prevented the nodal transport agency, which receives cab alerts, from promptly passing them on to the Delhi Police.
Consider this:
Only seven out of 50 Uber cabs had the panic button active. In five of these seven, there was no follow-up action from the Delhi Police despite waiting for 20 minutes on pressing the button.
– Of the 43 cabs, 29 did not have panic buttons at all. Drivers in 15 out of 29 cars said they had bought vehicles with fitness certificates from Haryana and UP, despite the Union Road Transport Ministry’s notification of the use of the panic button in 2016. Another 14 said they had bought their car before 2019, the cut-off year since these buttons became mandatory.
– In the list of the remaining 43, four drivers said their own children had broken the panic buttons on their cars; The trio said they had deactivated the button to prevent passengers from pushing it out of curiosity. And seven drivers said the button stopped working after performing the repair work.
Not just that — and it’s not just Uber.
hole in the system
On November 28, 2016, in the wake of the Uber rape case and the months-long ban imposed by the Delhi government on the cab aggregator, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways issued a notification that all public service vehicles, except two-wheelers, three-wheelers and e-rickshaws, Must be equipped with a VLTD and a panic button (see box).
On April 18, 2018, the ministry issued another notification specifying a cut-off date, and said that all such vehicles registered on and after January 1, 2019, would be equipped with this combo protection feature.
Once the panic button is pressed, an alert is sent every five seconds to the servers monitored by the Delhi Integrated Multi Modal Transit System (DIMTS), the nodal agency of the Department of Transport, which is immediately sent to the Emergency Response Support System of Delhi Police. is relayed. ERSS) at 112. But officials said alerting the police has so far been “a time-consuming process” due to the “lack of software integration between the two systems”.
“At present, when we get a panic button alert from the cab, we call the concerned police station, which gives the details to the PCR van. A transport official said, a lot of time is wasted in finding the right jurisdiction.
As per the Delhi Statistical Handbook 2021, the capital has an estimated registered fleet of 1,12,401 private commercial taxi vehicles. Delhi Transport Commissioner Ashish Kundra said 11,832 commercial taxis registered after 2019 have been equipped with VLTD and panic buttons in the capital – and the alerts are accessible through a web-based application.
“However, for achievement of panic alert integration with PCR 112 system, API (Application Programming Interface) documents and credentials are being obtained by the Transport Department from the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Operations and Communications). The integration is in an advanced stage and is likely to be completed within a month,” Kundra said. API is software that allows two applications to interact with each other.
Officials say an average of 50 panic button alerts are received every day from commercial taxis in Delhi, but “most of them are due to a tussle between the driver and the customer over payment issues”.
Delhi Police spokesperson Suman Nalwa said, “We have not received any panic button alerts from commercial taxis like Uber or Ola so far. This was to be done by the Transport Department as per the notification of the Central Government. To counter this, we have come up with our own app like Himmat Plus and equipped our PCR vans with state-of-the-art technology, which responds to emergency calls quickly. ,
Nalwa said it would take “about 20 days” for police to integrate their software with the Department of Transport’s monitoring agency and was in talks with the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), which was working on the initiative.
When asked about the delay, Transport Commissioner Kundra said: “The modalities for this integration are being worked out by the Transport Department and the Police Enforcement Agency on a priority basis.”
Both Kundra and police spokesperson Nalwa said that the software integration work for the buses (DTC and cluster services) has been completed.
Police officials say they respond within 15-20 minutes of each call received from DIMTS, but suggest that “it is better for riders to call 112 directly as we can track the location of the caller”. “.
But even the 112 system has “some bugs”. “For example, Vodafone-Idea and Reliance-Jio networks are integrated but still do not show the constant location of the caller, which is important in making timely interceptions,” an official said.
“Intermittent location is shown and not continuous location. There are some flaws in our system and CDAC is continuously working to improve location-based services for these networks,” said police spokesman Nalwa.
Uber has other security features of its own, including in-app SOS to raise alerts with police, ride status sharing with trusted contacts, and a 24×7 security team. But crucially, unlike the panic button, all of these features require riders to have access to their smartphones.
An Uber spokesperson said that to improve the safety of riders, the company’s ride-sharing app runs a “mandatory background check on all drivers prior to their first trip on Uber by an authorized third-party vendor.”
Transport officials said there are other hurdles to ensure compliance.
According to Kundra, apart from regular monitoring, “compulsory checks” of these equipment are done at the time of issuance of annual fitness certificates. For drivers tampering with the panic button or VLTD, he said, the department would issue e-challans to the owners and in cases of further non-compliance, the vehicle would be “automatically blacklisted through vehicle software”.
In addition, one of the key proposals in the Delhi Motor Vehicle Aggregation Scheme notified on July 5 is access to a web-based portal for the transport department where aggregators will update the details of their vehicles and drivers to ensure passenger safety.
But the Uber cab driver who was praised by The Indian Express pointed out other holes in the shield. Many of them said they managed to get fitness certificates for their vehicles at the Burari testing center on the outskirts of Delhi – without the panic button.
An official from the centre, which is one of the two centers in Delhi, said: “Around 800 vehicles visit this center every day. It is difficult to check every vehicle for a working panic button. We mainly check whether the documents are in place and the vehicle is not in damaged condition. ,
Transport commissioner Kundra said they are moving soon to “operate” an automated testing station in Burari, on the lines of other testing facility in southwest Delhi that caters to trucks.