Police control room forced to block calls due to desperate Romeos calling for love talk

Desperate Romeos in Bareilly, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, are driving young women police officers at the city's police control rooms to distraction with their love talk. Hundreds of calls come each day asking the ladies out on a date. While some want to straight away marry them, others say they will make do if the policewomen indulge in some dirty talk.

A frustrated police department has now blocked the SIM cards of 90 mobile phone owners. In October alone, more than 1,738 such calls were made. Many among those, knowing full well that the calls were being recorded, spoke such obscenity that the women officers were forced to run to their seniors for help. Female staff at the control room say there are close to 100 such calls each day. Circle officer (CO) Asit Srivastava said the officers on duty warn some of these men, but no amount or intensity of threats seem to work.



"Some of these youths call again, just hours later, wanting to engage in some more lewd conversation." Srivastava said 90 SIM cards had been blocked from November 1 this year. Some of these cards belonged to men who made more than six calls a day to the police control room, he said. "We are trying to ascertain the identity of the callers," Srivastava said, adding that the callers could be booked under Sections 294 (indulging in obscenity), 186 (obstructing a government servant on duty), 504 (intentional insult with intention to provoke breach of peace), and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code.

The CO added that there were occasions when the female officer would just hand the phone over to a male colleague, but the intrepid caller would roundly abuse the male officer, too, and threaten him with dire consequences. SP City Rajeev Malhotra said although the lewd calls had been made even earlier, attempts were made to track the numbers of the callers only in October. A police officer said that the callers were probably aware that the majority of women constables at the police control room were freshly recruited and young. Being new to the job, the women were not quite tough in their handling of lumpen elements, the official said.