Hyderabad, December 29: The movement demanding separate Telangana State and a counter movement in the coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions demanding that the State remain united have witnessed a large number of suicide attempts between November 29 and December 10.
In the short 11-day period there were a staggering number of 1,500 suicide attempt cases registered in the State against a normal figure of 500 in a month.
According to GVK Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI), they have been receiving a large number of phone calls every day ever since the movements were intensified in the State. There were many fake calls too made from public telephone booths by unidentified persons which the EMRI call center staff had to contend with.
“Every day we receive about 18,000 phone calls from Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telangana regions, of which more than 5,000 are fake.
Ever since the agitations started in all the regions of the State, the EMRI call center has been receiving more number of calls,” says Mohammad Ajmal, Assistant Par tner-Marketing of EMRI.
He says that most of the cases _ suicide _ were registered in Warangal (172), followed by Mahaboobnagar (133) and Rangareddy (132) while Srikakulam district registered the lowest number of cases at 21.
“To trim down fake and hoax calls from unidentified persons, the EMRI has set up a special team at the call center comprising senior professionals.
The special team will take all details of the incident such as caller’s name, address and incident location soon as they received call.
As per the information given by the caller, a special team can trace whether it is fake or not,” he adds.
GVK EMRI handles medical, police and fire emergencies through the `108 Emergency service’. This is a free service delivered through state-of-the-art emergency call response centers and has over 1,900 ambulances across Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Goa, Chennai, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Assam, Meghalaya and Madhya Pradesh. With the expansion of fleet and services set to spread across more States, GVK EMRI will have more than 10,000 ambulances covering over a billion population by 2011.
“With the introduction of Arogya Sri health scheme by the State Government in corporate and government hospitals, the EMRI is providing a 108 emergency vehicle which covera three mandals in the state. As of now, there are 752 `108 emergency’ vehicles plying in the State,” Ajmal says.
In the medical cases category, Hyderabad district has registered 1,547 cases while Rangareddy accounts for 2,255 of the 41,828 cases registered in the State. In the twin cities, most of the suicide and accident cases were registered in Rangareddy district.
–Agencies