Government's new web portal for Delhi-NCR users could be of great help in tracing lost or stolen mobile phones.

Cases of theft of mobile devices are commonplace, especially in metro cities where there is a lot of travelling & also there are people who quite often forget their phones in public places. To be kind to such people & come up with a solution to such cases where the mobile devices either get stolen or lost, the government is offering a web portal that will not only help people in tracing their mobile handsets but, also help them block their devices so that nobody gets to misuse the phones.

The said work has already been undertaken by the telecom department to clear issues of security, theft & other issues linked to them which includes reprogramming of mobile devices as well. And, the Central Equipment Identity Register (CEIR) system has also been quite forward in supporting the project.

This is good news for subscribers in Delhi-NCR & other adjoining areas as nearly 5 crores of users are said to benefit by the project. The software is said to be so efficient that it can even block a user’s mobile device, even if the handset is on a cloned IMEI number.

For taking full advantage of this software, all those user’s whose mobile devices get lost or stolen first need to log into the portal for registering their complaint by uploading the document of the police complaint & also provide an ID proof. The software will then block the lost or stolen handset according to the information the user provides. Police can even recover the handset by tracing the phone using the tower signals in case someone tries to misuse the phone.

Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad made a statement on the progress of the initiative in Mumbai that already nearly 500-600 complaints were logged in by Mumbaikars. He added saying that in the city, traceability information gets passed to the police in half of the cases. Further, the stolen or lost phones cannot be traced if the person stealing it doesn’t use the phone but, it can be blocked & will be of no use to the person stealing it as it cannot be sold then.

The project was initiated in Mumbai last year in September for subscribers in Delhi-NCR for helping users in tracing their stolen or lost phones. The portal will be of great help to the users as in it will not only let the users register a complaint on their portal, but it will also provide services to existing users with the same international Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, block their mobile devices across different mobile network services, it will help the police authorities by sharing the tracing data & will also help to unblock recovered phones.