GHAZIABAD: Women working on contract for UP Polices Dial 112 emergency service staged a protest outside their office in Ghaziabads Govindpuram on Tuesday, demanding that their monthly salary be increased from Rs 12,000 to Rs 18,000.With more than 50% of the workforce hitting the street, others had to pitch in with extra working hours so that emergency calls from across the state could be addressed.Started in 2016, the Dial 112 service operates out of call centres in Lucknow, Ghaziabad and Prayagraj. Calls regarding police help from across the state land in these three centres and are directed to local stations for acting on them.Trouble started on November 3, when the UP Polices contract for managing the call centres ended with Tech Mahindra. The new contract was handed over to We Win.The protesters said that apart from a hike in salary, they needed appointment letters from the new company to ensure they would be absorbed and at least two off days in a month.A similar protest, they said, had started in Lucknow.A 26-year-old woman, who was part of the Ghaziabad protest on Tuesday, said a monthly pay of Rs 12,000 was too little to run a family. I am the sole earning member in a family of five. My salary is definitely not enough to sustain the daily expenses. Half of it goes in paying the house rent and electricity bill. The rest of it is spent on food, my sisters education and mothers medicines, she told TOI, adding that she hadnt received an increment since 2017.Although police sources said emergency services werent disrupted on Tuesday, they expressed concern that an extended strike could affect work. Veerendra Kumar, additional DCP (Dial 112), said 43 women worked in three shifts at the Ghaziabad call centre.We tried to reason with the protesters and assured them that our senior officers in Lucknow were in talks with the new company regarding the salary hike, Kumar added.According to a police source, the new company, We Win, had agreed to increase the employees monthly salary to Rs 15,000.The protest took a political turn when Congress Rahul Gandhi tweeted on X, The girls who listen to the problems of the entire state and are ready day and night to solve them. Do they not even have the right to raise their voice? Has BJP put even demanding rights in the category of crime?Former chief minister and Samajwadi Party supremo Akhilesh Yadav also took to X to criticise the state government. ... Even before meeting the CM, the sisters and daughters who sat in the cold all night and made their demands were taken into custody in the morning. The true form of BJPs worship of women is Nari Bandhan, he posted.In another post, Yadav shared a video of police detaining the protesters. Those who talk about giving reservations to women are giving them detainment. Have those who changed the name changed the name of Reservation to Hirasat? he captioned it.Police officials said there were 30 primary rate interfaces (PRI) in the state — 20 in Lucknow and five each in Ghaziabad and Prayagraj. At a time, 30 calls can be taken by each PRI, which means UP Police can handle 900 emergency calls at one go. These calls are transferred through a BSNL network, for which a setup has been made by the state-run company in Agra.Over 1.5 lakh emergency calls (425 a day on average) were made from Ghaziabad through 2022. Around 500-550 emergency calls are received by Ghaziabad police daily. Their counterparts in Noida handle 200 to 250 emergency calls a day.

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