In the week following the Mumbai attacks, Deputy Commissioner (Detective Department) Jawed Shamim had announced that unmanned public coin-booths posed a problem for tracing persons making bomb hoax calls. Such booths could also be possibly used by the miscreants to communicate with anti-national elements, he said.

He had added that as far as possible, efforts would be made to dismantle such booths. Without a government order, the police could carry out the task of removing such booths only in a few localities.

“Since there is no government order, we can only request the telephone company and owner of unmanned telephone booths to close their operation. We can’t force them,” Shamim said.

Hoax calls over the past three months have kept the police busy. Calls have been made about bombs at important buildings, including the Calcutta High Court premises but all turned out to be hoax. What has been established, though, is that all hoax calls were made from coin-operated public booths.

In the latest instance, a day before Christmas eve, a Kolkata-based television channel received a hoax call warning of a possible attack at four Metro railway stations of the city.

PCO operators in the city, too, are confused by the police orders.

Akhilesh Pathak, a booth owner on Hare Street, said: “We only received verbal notice from the Hare Street police station to note down the names and address of the callers. It is impossible to note down the names of every caller, which is why we have not followed it.

In the first week of December, policemen had come and removed my coin-operated PCO. They took it with them. They never returned it.”

Bijoy Roy, a booth owner in Jadavpur, said: “We have not yet received any order to verify caller’s identity”.

And according to a chemist in the vicinity who has installed such a PCO in his shop, “I have coin-operated booth outside my shop, but it is impossible for me to keep a constant vigil on all the callers.”