DCW's women's helpine receives over two lakh calls in the last six months

Seems like more and more women in the Capital are calling into the Delhi Commission for Women helpline. Statistics show that in the last six months about 2.14 lakh calls have been answered and women assisted in different concern areas.

When asked about the concerns that women dial 181 for mostly a DCW official said, “The most calls we get are regarding domestic violence. Other than that stalking, rape, dowry, family issues, child sexual abuse are also some of the issues women call our helpline for,” to SheThePeople.TV.

Also read: Noida to launch helpline for women soon

Women not only call on the women’s helpline to discuss such issues they also call to enquire about certain government policies, legal procedures, hospital-related issues and student programmes etc. These calls are attended by various operators who are trained to handle these calls in a sensitive manner. In total there are about 30 call operators currently working at the DCW.

The DCW official told us that in one day approximately 1500 to 2000 calls are attended and they extend help in the form of sending police officials and DCW helpline counsellors to the caller.

About the awareness among the general public, the DCW official said, "The reach of DCW is definitely growing that is why women feel free to call us, earlier it was not the same and women would feel shy from calling and telling their grievances."

When this year 2.14 lakh calls have been received, last year in the same period only 1.61 lakh calls had been attended to. Since DCW has taken charge, they have improved the women’s helpline service by employing more operators and supervisor, earlier there were only 14 people working in total, in a short period DCW has doubled the staff to cater to more women complainants.

Also read: Panic buttons in handsets: Govt sets Jan 2017 deadline

Currently, Promila Gupta of DCW is in-charge of the Women’s Helpline and takes care that as many complaints as possible are registered and resolved. On being asked how has DCW been able to bolster the number of calls received, the official said, “We advertised the number 181 a lot so that more people got to know about it. Then the helpline was under-staffed so we increased the numbers to at least three to four operators per shift so it was easier to take more calls. We will see in future if the workload increases then we will add more operators to the team but as of now the helpline is working smoothly.”

Feature Image Credit: Daily Mail