Kathmandu, February 19

On an average, 40 to 50 persons are always seen in a queue outside a makeshift tent set up on the premises of Metropolitan Police Range, Teku, to register complaints regarding stolen or lost mobile phones.

MPR, Teku, has deployed only one assistant sub-inspector to keep the record of complaints regarding missing/lost mobile phones. To file a complaint, one has to produce the IMEI number of the missing mobile phone. Police ask complainants to come after a month. But in most cases people do not get any information about their missing mobile phones.

Complaints of more than 17,000 stolen mobile phones were registered with MPR, Teku, last fiscal, of which police could only find 1,518 mobile phones. A total of 8,306 complaints have already been filed in the first six months of the current fiscal regarding stolen/lost mobile phones. Of them, police have been successful in tracing only 1,259 such mobile phones and handing them over to their rightful owners.

DSP Hobindra Bogati at MPR said that although it was easy to trace the location of mobile phones, police had to go through legal procedures causing delay in retrieving them.

“First we need to get permission from the court to trace missing mobile phones on the basis IMEI number, as it would otherwise violate the right to privacy. The court takes up to 15 days for this process,” DSP Bogati said, adding, after getting permission from the court, they requested Nepal Telecommunication Authority to trace the location of the phones.

“NTA also takes a long time to provide information about lost phones,” he said, adding that it cannot trace the location if the stolen mobile phones are sold in the bordering towns of India. Spokesperson for NTA Min Prasad Aryal said it was not an easy task for them to trace the missing mobile phones on the basis of IMEI number since they received hundreds of requests for the same every day.” Aryal also said they did not have equipment identity registry system, which would make the task of tracing the location of mobile phones easy and quick. “We are planning to instal the system within a few months,” he added.