Govt releases SOP for child helpline 1098, to have a 24*7 control room

The government has come out with standard operating procedures for child helpline 1098 which will have a 24x7 dedicated control room in each state and Union territory and will be integrated with emergency response support system 112.

The Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) said the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will provide necessary technical infrastructure for setting up of control rooms in all states and UTs where child helpline and women helpline call takers shall be co-located so as to handle women and child related calls in a single location.

The helpline operator has to have a Masters in Law/Social Work/Sociology/Social Science/ Psychology with at least five years' experience of working on relevant domains in an administrative set-up with a government or non-government project/programme and preferably with at least one-year experience of counselling either within or outside the same set-up, the SOP stated.

The operator should be preferably a resident of the local community so that local human resource and expertise is utilized for effective functioning of the centre, it said.

The WCD-Control Room shall work in close coordination and supervision of State Child Protection Society (SCPS) in matters related to children, it said.

The states have been asked to identify state-level nodal officer and second-level nodal officer with one of them possessing technical knowledge and expertise to support C-DAC.

The states need to provide sufficient space for setting up the WCD Control Room and WHL and CHL call-takers to be co-located in same control room premises, it said.

The SOP state that call operators should be trained for answering calls and shall practise on scripts for answering various categories of calls.

"Whenever a call is made to 1098, it is auto-routed to concerned State's or UT's WCD Control Room. Caller's identification and caller location is obtained through telephone subscriber database and location based services," it said.

The SOP said once a call lands on WCD-CR, a unique ID number is generated for each call and call is transferred to the call operator.

"The decision of transferring the call to CHL units shall be done within five minutes of the call," it stated.