

Mint Explainer | Why is India rolling out an emergency alert system on phones?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.At 11.40 am on Saturday, millions of phones across India blared a loud alert simultaneously, interrupting calls and conversations. The disruption was deliberate. It was a nationwide test of a multilingual cell broadcast system developed by the state-owned Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) for emergency warnings during disasters.
Why is India rolling out this system? Mint explainsCell broadcast is a technology that sends a single message to all mobile phones in a specific area simultaneously through nearby mobile towers, unlike SMS, which delivers messages one by one. The system works independently of internet connectivity or mobile data. Such alerts are designed to override phone settings and cannot be disabled by users.During a flood, a cyclone or any serious public safety situation, authorities need to warn people quickly and help them prepare.
To enable this, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and C-DOT tested the automated emergency warning system on Saturday.“We sent about 12-14 crore cell broadcast test messages on Saturday within 10 seconds. The advantage of broadcast is that everyone who is there gets the exact same message. It makes a loud noise to alert people and reads the voice message to help people who cannot read and write.
It changes the language on the fly,” C-DOT CEO Rajkumar Upadhyay told Mint.Certain poll-bound states were excluded due to the model code of conduct, Upadhyay explained, adding that the decision was to cover all of Delhi and state capital cities. Besides, some handset models that did not support the system properly might have missed out on the alert.Some users went into panic mode after the loud buzz on their phones. Even as
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