STS Speaker. Satisfied Callers: Police and Corporate Customer Service Technology in India

State organizations are infamous for their insatiable appetites for documentation, but sometimes they refuse to produce documents. In India, police officers often refuse to register complaints and initiate proceedings. A recent project by the police in the Indian state of Punjab has aimed to eliminate this practice. The state hired a private corporation to run a call center to take emergency calls to the police. Young, middle-class, educated women staff the phones and act as case coordinators, dispatching police in locations across the state and monitoring the progress of cases through an elaborate database that logs communications from victims and police documents. Procedures embedded in corporation software translates the government procedure into the language of customer service.