MUMBAI, July 24 -- Forty-two-year-old head constable Parag Kapdanis, attached to the Kurla police station, is constantly hooked to a phone. He isn't chatting or playing games; rather, he is trying to convince people residing in far-off places to return the mobile phones they are using, as the instruments have been reported stolen or missing, a cognisable crime. Thanks to the efforts of the policemen like Kapdanis, his zone was able to return around 634 mobile phones lost or stolen since 2023 to their rightful owners. A police officer told HT that after the location of a person who had a stolen/lost phone in his possession was traced-which was most often out of Maharashtra-a long process began to recover the phone. "We can't go to every location for every single phone, as the expense on this is considerable," he said. "So, we call the SIM card holder and let them know that the mobile phone in their possession has been reported stolen or missing and that they should immediately return it or face criminal action. We tell them to courier the phone to the local police station where the case is registered." Thanks to the Central Equipment Identity Registry (CEIR), an initiative of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the recovery of stolen or lost mobile handsets has gone up considerably, said a police officer. "After the introduction of CEIR, we have deployed dedicated policemen like Kapadnis to trace and bring back missing mobile phones," he said. According to the replies given by the police to a Right to Information (RTI) application, in 2019, a total of 43,397 mobile handsets were reported stolen or lost in the city and only 2,088 were recovered. In 2020, the figure came down to 39,819 but only 1,916 of the handsets were recovered. Similarly, in 2021, out of 51,030 stolen or lost phones, only 3,230 were recovered. Pramod Todarmal, senior police inspector at Kurla police station, said that the missing handsets were sent to far-off places like the northern and north-eastern states. "Earlier, we used to only get the mobile number whenever a stolen or lost mobile handset was restarted and a new SIM card was inserted in it," he said. "Now, CEIR provides us with the name and address of the individual using the handset. This helps us trace and recover the phones." The Kurla police station recovered around 126 phones in June this year. Recently, the Cuffe Parade police too used CEIR to track down an army jawan who had stolen 29 mobile phones left for charging in the Colaba Military Camp. When the handset owners approached the Cuffe Parade police station, the phones' IMEIs-the unique number associated with the handset-were blocked on the CEIR portal. After almost a month, the jawan, identified as 24-year-old B Alfa Rabohi Beho, believing that the police would be off his trail, inserted a SIM card into one of the stolen phones. The CEIR system immediately sent a message to the police, who tracked his location to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. A team under DCP Pravin Munde then brought him back to the city and recovered 20 phones from him. "Under the guidance of the police commissioner, we are continuously trying to trace more and more stolen and lost mobile phones," said Mohit Garg, deputy commissioner of police, Zone II. "When a mobile phone is reported stolen/ missing, we insert the IMEI on the CEIR portal and block it. CEIR is connected to the IMEI database of all the mobile operators and acts as a central system for all network operators to share details of blacklisted mobile devices, and ensures that devices blacklisted in one network do not work on another even if the SIM card in the device is changed." Garg said that once the data, like the IMEI number and billing details, was filled in and the phone blocked, whenever a new SIM card was inserted, two messages were generated-one to the police station where the theft or loss was reported and the other to the complainant. "The police then track down the phone via the newly inserted SIM card," added Garg, whose team returned around 166 stolen mobile phones in 2023, 188 in 2024 and 112 so far this year to their rightful owners. The officer pointed out that Section 314 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita punished dishonest misappropriation of property and Section 317 dealt with receiving stolen property. "Using these sections, we send notices to the users of the stolen or lost phones and prompt them to send them to the police stations where the complaints are registered," he said. This year, so far, the Mumbai police's Zone V, headed by DCP Ganesh Gawade, has recovered and returned around 634 mobile phones. Zone II under DCP Garg returned around 125 mobile phones valued at around Rs.15 lakh while Zone X recovered and returned around 344 mobile phones valued at around Rs.32 lakh. "The country-wise recovery rate is 14.4% through the CEIR portal, but in Mumbai the recovery percentage stands at 10.1%," said an official from the DoT. "Andaman and Nicobar has the highest recovery rate of 36% and Mizoram 30%. Since 2019 DoT has received around 34 lakhs block requests."...