Now, PCO booth owners to maintain customer details

The spate of hoax calls in the city may soon end with the police taking preventive measures to spoil the fun of such mischievous pranksters. In a circular mailed to all PCO Coin Booth and STD Booth owners, the police have directed them to maintain full details of their customers such as name and address of the customer, the phone number dialed by them, time of dialing.

Put to practice in the aftermath of the serial blasts that rocked Bangalore, this measure is expected to put an end to hoax calls and also tighten the investigations of the police in such other crimes.

From the PCO/STD Booth owners, the problem is in collecting and maintaining the required data. As one booth owner said, many of the people who come to make a call are in an emergency or in a hurry, so they may not co-operate with the booth owner and give their personal details.

A somewhat similar rule has been made mandatory for cyber centres where they are expected to similarly take personal details of the customers and preserve them for inspection by the police. But in practice, few cyber cafes are following this, for obvious reasons. Will this rule imposed on the phone booth owners also end up remaining only in theory?