Bhubaneswar: In the past, Odisha Police have come up with a number of techno-savvy projects to make it easier for the common people, especially women, to avail various services offered by the department. However, they often fall short of the desired goals due poor implementation, lack of coordination and efforts on the part of the authorities.
‘Mo Sathi’, a women-specific mobile application, lunched by Commissionerate Police, is a case in point. This mobile app, sponsored by the Industrial Development of Corporation of Odisha (IDCO), was launched in 2015. A response to an RTI query revealed that IDCO gave the Commissionerate Police `2,93,871 to introduce the app. Of this amount, the Commissionerate Police spent `48,450 to lunch the app and another `15,000 on a guest lecturer. Interestingly, the PIO, in his reply, denied having any record related to the expenditure of the remaining amount.
Suyoga Computech Private Limited was tasked with developing the app, but the Commissionerate Police reportedly did not appoint any agency to maintain or upgrade it. As a result, only 4,805 people downloaded the app from Google Play in the last five years.
Information received through RTI revealed that 96 women used the app to seek police help in 2015. The number of such women declined to 83 in 2016 and 138 women used the app in 2017. Only 62 women used it in 2018, while only 36 used the app during the first seven months of 2019 to make distress calls to the modern control room.
The miniscule number of complaints received through the ‘Mo Sathi’ app in face of the steep rise in incidents of atrocity against women, including rape and sexual abuse, prove the failure of the app. Recently, the Commissioner of Police announced the merger of the app with ‘Sahayata app’ of Odisha police and operated by the Odisha State Crime Records Bureau (OSCRB).
However, the response to the ‘Sahayata app’ too has not been encouraging. The SCRB, while replying in response to another RTI application, revealed that only 1,300 people have downloaded the ‘Sahayata’ app in the 20 months since its launch in March 2018. Many users on the Google Play have posted many adverse comments about the app.
