Immediately, a text message is sent to the identified force to respond to the case. The time lag for the entire sequence of events is 10 seconds till the identification of the location of the caller, and one minute till the assigning of the case.

A futuristic vision of the way the police needs to function in the country? Not really. More of a report on how the Gurgaon police are working at present, thanks to the new-age GPS system that they installed a month ago. Devised by the Pune-based Geotrackers, the defining feature of this system are the 200 radios with built-in GPS that the Gurgaon police have equipped their fleet of patrol parties, jeeps and motorcycles with, making it the first police force in the country to do so.

This has enabled exact and real-time monitoring and tracking of their ground forces, taking response time to an emergency to a whole new level of efficiency.

“The contract for the project was given to us two years ago and we started with the dry runs in January,” said Ajay Mittal founder of Geotrackers, which has its engineering and manufacturing base in Pune and the head office in Delhi.

The Rs 2-crore project, formally inaugurated on February 15, comprises a theatre-sized projection screen on which the digital map of Gurgaon is projected with locations of the police vans, motorcycles, SHOs, officers on duty displayed as per colour coding. Using the Advanced Vehicle Location System, the location of the Dial-100 caller is displayed on this map along with locations of the nearest police force that can be deployed as per the seriousness of the call.

“Police forces in other parts of the country too use GPS; what’s unique about the Gurgaon initiative is the GPS-enabled radios that their personnel and vehicles now carry, which makes it easy for the control room to monitor their activities, patrolling habits, routes, halts and so on at all times. We have devised these radios in partnership with another company Thunderbird,” said Mittal, an IIT alumni who founded Geotracks a couple of years ago in partnership with his wife Madhavi Bhode (a computer science postgraduate) and IIM graduate Luv Jan.

“The discipline and efficient communication of the ground forces that the system enables is the need of the hour given today’s security requirements,” said Jan, the Delhi-based partner of the company.

Nevertheless, the Gurgaon police force has been the only one in the country to go in for the system till now. “We have written to the police heads of all the states explaining the system but not surprisingly few have responded,” said Mittal.