Call drops cost 16-year-old girl's life? Delhi resident's social media post sparks controversy

Even as the problem of call drops continues to plague citizens across the country, here’s one incident which brings the seriousness of the issue to the fore. Acclaimed chef Manu Chandra posted on Twitter recently that a girl with stab wounds died after his mother could not get through to the police of an ambulance service.

“Desperately trying to call police and ambulance…the mother could do nothing because Airtel networks never there. Life lost. Airtel rich,” Chandra tweeted .

Chandra’s mother Kumkum was reported as saying by Hindustan Times that she spent more than five minutes trying to call the police after she saw four wounded people near her house. She could not take the girl, who was one of the persons wounded, to the hospital as there was no one to drive the car, the report said. Eventually, her domestic help, who is not a trained driver, is said to have taken her to a hospital.

On 1 September, telecom minister Ravishankar Prasad had said that the call drop issue ‘is a national concern’ and that it is important for telecom operators to reinforce infrastructure. Prasad also said that the regulator is preparing an information paper which analyses the extent of call drops in Mumbai and Delhi.

More recently, Prasad had said that the call drops problem has begun to improve. He was reported to have said that out of a total of 34,460 mobile sites which were defective, 16,962 were repaired in the third week of September.

The government recently asked promoters of telecom companies including Anil Ambani and Sunil Mittal to intervene in the matter, and warned that companies could face penal action.