The 108 emergency ambulance service was unavailable for nearly 24 hours in the Telugu states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. This disconnection was caused after a fibre cable was damaged at Hyderabad’s Outer Ring Road.
The main call centre for 108 operates out of Hyderabad for both the states. The call centre receives around 40,000 calls a day while Telangana has 316 ambulances, Andhra possesses 436.
The GVK Emergency Management and Research Institue (EMRI) call centre run in Hyderabad with BSNL telecommunication lines.
There was road cutting work in progress at Kompally which caused the disconnection. This resulted in the call centre receiving only 25% of the usual calls.
President of Telangana 108 Employee Association, Ashok Palle reported that the drivers of the ambulances received lesser calls than usual on Monday due to the disturbance.
Mahender Reddy, Hyderabad Police Commissioner informed a news channel that ‘100’ services was automatically re-established with the help of another service provider.
BSNL and GVK EMRI both blamed the road cutting work as the cause for the disconnection and unnecessary trouble to thousands of civilians.
