Gujarat has moved fire emergency calls in six cities onto its Dial 112 system. Calls to the old fire number 101 in Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Jamnagar, Gandhinagar and Bhavnagar now go to the Dial 112 state control room, with BSNL diverting the old number, IANS reported (via Social News XYZ). DeshGujarat, citing an official of EMRI, which runs the service, reported the first phase went live on September 24.
How dispatch changes
Until now each city’s fire brigade ran its own control room, and staff passed details along by hand. Under the new setup, the state control room logs the call and the caller’s location, picks the nearest free fire vehicle and sends the job straight to a Mobile Data Terminal inside it. The state has fitted 237 fire and rescue vehicles with GPS and these terminals, both reports said. DeshGujarat added that the system records each stage of a call digitally: dispatch, arrival, completion and the vehicle’s return.
Ahmedabad has gone a step further. Connect Gujarat reported that about 100 of the city’s fire vehicles carry GPS trackers, tablets and 360-degree cameras that stream video to the central control room at Paldi, so officers can size up a fire before crews arrive and decide whether to send more.
One number, four services
Gujarat launched Dial 112 on August 31, 2025, for police, medical and women-and-child emergencies. Last month Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghavi flagged off 500 more Janrakshak response vehicles, taking the fleet to 1,000, and ANI reported the state’s average police response time at 10 minutes 49 seconds, against a target of under eight. With fire added, the state says it is the first in India to put all four major emergency services behind a single number.
What it means for residents
If you live in one of the six cities, you can still dial 101; the call will land at 112. Rajkot, the largest city in Saurashtra, is not in the first phase, and the state has not announced dates for later phases, so residents elsewhere should keep using their local fire number for now.
Central dispatch helps most in mixed emergencies, such as a building fire with injured people, where one control room can now coordinate the fire tender, the ambulance and the police van. The trade-off is local knowledge. City fire control rooms knew their own lanes, and a state room will lean on location data and GPS. The state already publishes average police response times for 112. Fire response times, city by city, would show residents whether the change is working.
What to watch
- The schedule for bringing Rajkot and the remaining municipal corporations and districts into the system.
- Whether the state publishes fire response times alongside its police figures.
- How the system handles peak loads, such as Diwali night, when fire calls spike across cities at once.
Sources: IANS via Social News XYZ, DeshGujarat, Connect Gujarat, DeshGujarat (112 launch), ANI
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.