Corona Caller Tune Is No More!

The Government of India is considering stopping playing the Covid-19 caller tune/announcement and the reports on the same suggest that the official sources are thinking of “dropping COVID-19 pre-call announcements from phones after almost two years of raising awareness about the disease.”

As life is returning to normalcy across the nation, it is expected for the government to finally stop playing the Covid-19 caller tune before making calls. For the unversed, the Covid-19 caller tune was commenced two years back when the virus was spread rapidly in India and eventually went into complete lockdown.

The caller tune featured the voice of Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan in 2020 wherein the actor listed safety measures for the pandemic. From January 2021, it was replaced by a female voice to alert callers about the Covid-19 vaccination drive with the message: “The new year has brought a new ray of hope in the form of vaccines. Vaccines developed in India are safe, effective and will provide immunity.”

And the current caller tune message is on India’s vaccination milestone. Though the government believes that the “caller tune” helped in spreading awareness, it also said that it became an inconvenience for callers as they were forced to listen to the message. This also led to the calls taking a long time to connect and thus, had to rely on WhatsApp calls.

The DoT, in a recent letter to the Ministry of Health, said, ‘After a lapse of almost 21 months, these announcements have served the purpose of creating awareness among citizens and have no relevance now. The message being played over the ‘network runs the risk of interception and delay of important calls during emergencies and consumes precious bandwidth resources’, the letter said.