Google Announces its Emergency Location Service (ELS) Activation in India: Now Rolled out in Uttar Pradesh

In the Indian region, Google’s Emergency Location Service (ELS) has now been integrated onto Android and is now active. This feature has now been rolled out in Uttar Pradesh, making it the first Indian state to support its accessibility.

Here’s more about the update.

Emergency Location Service (ELS) – Now Accessible in India

Google introduced its Emergency Location Service or ELS for emergency scenarios where communicating the accurate location may not be possible due to poor network or caller distress. This built-in feature of Android is intended to help emergency services to find the location of a caller when they make a 112 call or SMS. Relying on connectivity aspects like mobile network, WiFi, and GPS signals (data fusion*), the feature will be able to share the call location automatically, and it is said to work even if the call drops immediately.

For the first time ever, the ELS feature is now accessible in India, and it has been initially rolled out in Uttar Pradesh (UP). The UP Police department has already integrated the feature onto its emergency response system (with the 112 emergency services*), collaborating with Pert Telecom Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (PertSol). To note, it will only work while making emergency calls, and it is entirely made free to users. The feature will be compatible with Android OS versions 6.0 and above, and will provide accurate location within a radius of 50 meters. Additionally, language settings can also be transmitted via the feature, and responders will thereby easily be able to communicate with the caller. Also, Google will not collect nor store the location data by any means.

Speaking more, before the implementation and release of ELS, it was thoroughly tested. Over a period of seven months, over 20 million calls and SMS messages were looked into by the ELS feature, and it was successfully able to determine the location details of the caller. It can thus be believed that taking the example of UP, more Indian states may soon consider integrating the ELS feature to their emergency systems as well. We’ll wait and see.