Panic button in mobile phones from January 1: Delhi Police

New Delhi: The city police on Wednesday informed the Delhi High Court that from January 1, 2017 the `panic button` in every mobile phones will be introduced, to help people in distress, especially women.

A division bench of Justice B.D. Ahmed and Justice Ashutosh Kumar was informed by the Delhi Police that it has also planned to do away with all existing emergency number such as 100, 101, 102 and 108 and introduce a single emergency number 112.

For a period of one year, all existing emergency numbers will be treated as secondary numbers and will be re-routed to 100, till the 112 number is implemented.

Delhi Police, in its affidavit, also said that they were carrying out a comparative study of response time of other police forces in major metropolitan cities across the world to evolve a strategy to deal with the situation.

During the hearing, Delhi State Legal Service Authority Member Secretary Dharmesh Sharma termed as "unsavoury" the manner in which police stored the biological or chemical samples from crime scenes in the police station`s malkhanas.

The court had asked Sharma to carry out an inspection across the police stations in Delhi to check the ground reality with regard to the manner and procedure adopted by police during the crime investigation process.