LAHORE: Punjab Emergency Services (Rescue 1122) receive at least 61,000 calls in a day while only 3,000 out of them are genuine and in need of rescue services, Pakistan Today has learnt.
Rescue 1122 Spokesperson Jam Sajjad said that only 2% of the total calls their department received were genuine distress calls while the number of fake calls was around 58,000 per day. “The rest are so-called pranks.”
“It is regrettable that sometimes women call us and ask our representatives to share biryani making recipes. Sometimes they demand mobile balance,” he added.
He further told that Rescue 1122 had received a total of 140 million calls ever since 2014 and out of it only 6 million were genuine calls.
“The estimated response time of our rescue teams has dropped down from 7 minutes to 4 minutes within the city after we launched the motorcycle ambulance service, but the prank calls limit our efficiency as sometimes they result in loss of resources for us,” he said.
Sajjad said that sudden increase of fake calls sometimes also resulted in the unavailability of the emergency hotline, which is very unfortunate.