The Odisha Government has decided to be a part of the Nationwide Emergency Response System (NERS) under the Nirbhaya scheme.
The NERS is a single emergency response number (112) which can be used in any emergency, especially by women in distress.
The State Government would soon sign a memorandum of understanding with the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to implement the NERS, said a senior official in the State Home Department..
The MHA had written to all State Governments proposing to sign MoUs with them for maintaining standards and quality of the NERS, which aims to integrate services including police, fire and ambulance.
It would also be integrated with the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways that involves setting up emergency buttons in buses.
Now there are different phone numbers to call police, fire and ambulance services, namely, 100, 102, 103, and other numbers for different kinds of emergency.
The MHA mooted the plan in the aftermath of the December 16, 2012 gangrape of a young woman in the national capital as it was realised that all emergency services should be converted into a single emergency response system.
The Department of Telecommunications has allotted the emergency number 112 for this service.
It is a centralised system with the IT infrastructure hosted on central cloud services. This system connects with the State-level Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), which facility will run 24 hours.
The system is envisaged to take inputs from various sources such as mobile phone calls, landline calls, SMSs, emails, chat messengers, panic buttons in public transport, voices over IP, mobile applications and internet of things devices.