Emergency location and public alerts are the systems in a mobile network that find where a person calling for help is, and send warnings to every phone in an area during a disaster. In India, the single emergency number is 112. It connects to police, fire services and ambulances, and each state runs its own control room for it, under the Emergency Response Support System (ERSS).
When someone dials 112, the call reaches the state control room. The caller may be hurt or frightened, or may not know the place. So the control room needs the location from the network itself.
The network can give the location in two ways. The first comes from the operator. The packet core and the voice systems know which tower, and which side of the tower, the phone is using. In a city, that narrows the location to a few hundred metres. On a highway, one side of a tower can cover several kilometres. The operator's location system sends this to the control room within seconds.
The second way comes from the phone. A modern smartphone can work out its own position from GPS and nearby Wi-Fi networks when an emergency number is dialled. The phone then sends this position to the emergency service automatically, by a data message or an SMS. This position is often accurate to about 50 metres. In India, this works only where the state's 112 system is set up to receive the phone's position. Uttar Pradesh's 112 system was the first in India to receive these positions from Android phones, in December 2025.
Here is a typical case. A bus driver dials 112 at night after a crash on a ghat road near Satara. He cannot say exactly where he is. The tower's coverage on that side stretches over 4 km of the road. If the state's 112 system receives the phone's own position, that position narrows the location to within 40 metres, between two hairpin bends. The control room can then send the nearest ambulance to that point.
Public alerts work in the other direction. A government agency, such as a disaster management authority, writes a warning and marks the area on a map. It sends the alert through a government communication platform, and the operators deliver it. One method sends an SMS to every number registered in the area. Another, called cell broadcast, sends one message from every tower in the area to every phone connected to it, without needing the phone numbers. A phone shows a cell broadcast alert as a loud, full-screen message, even in silent mode. India's Department of Telecommunications began testing cell broadcast alerts across the country in 2023. In May 2026, the government launched a nationwide cell broadcast alert system. It was built by the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), the department's research centre. The towers that send these alerts belong to the radio access network.
These systems are separate from lawful interception, although both locate phones. Emergency location acts only when a person calls for help, and public alerts go to everyone in an area.