A strike by 1,180 contract technicians has left Gujarat’s home-warning network short of maintenance — and revealed that 3.24 million of the 4.62 million household links counted by the state showed no connection to its central system last month. The government has spent ₹1.86 billion (about €20 million) on the network, billed as a way to carry emergency alerts into homes.
The technicians stopped work on Monday, 12 October, over three months of unpaid wages. Their walkout prompted a review of the state’s published service figures and visits to 62 households across eight districts. Only 17 homes had a working alert speaker; residents at six others said they had never received the device listed against their address.
The numbers behind the network
The household system uses small internet-connected speakers to relay spoken warnings, including flood and cyclone notices. It is meant to supplement mobile alerts, not replace them. Yet a budget note presented to the Gujarat Assembly last year described all 4.62 million registered links as “covered households”, without separating active devices from those that had gone silent.
The state’s monthly service table shows 1.38 million devices sent a signal to the control centre in September. That leaves 3.24 million without a recorded check-in. Technicians said many devices lose their connection when a router is changed or a household moves; the network needs a visit to reconnect them.
They count every registered box as a live household, even if it has been silent since last monsoon.
Ben B. Hall, contract relay technician
The strike has halted those visits in 18 districts, according to technicians’ work rosters. The disruption does not appear to have stopped mobile-phone alerts: the state’s emergency office said its phone warning service remained operational and no major alert was due during the walkout.
Officials dispute the gap
Ada Durmaz, a deputy director in the state’s Emergency Communications Directorate, said the 3.24 million figure “does not mean the equipment is missing or useless”. Some devices, she said, are designed to check in only when a warning is issued, while others may be temporarily offline. She did not provide a count of units that had successfully delivered a test message in the past year.
A service contract published on the state procurement portal sets payments partly by the number of registered household links. It also requires a quarterly test, but the latest public filing lists the test as “in progress” and gives no result. The contractor did not answer questions about how many speakers passed the previous test.
Alaknanda Morar-Sane, an opposition legislator who sits on the Assembly’s public accounts panel, said she would seek a district-by-district count of working devices and a pause on coverage claims until the figures are checked. “A warning system is not a spreadsheet,” she said. “If the speaker stays silent, the family is not covered.”
Technicians say they will return when the government pays arrears and agrees to a fixed inspection schedule. The directorate said talks were under way and urged residents to keep their phones switched on for official alerts. With the state’s post-monsoon review due in November, legislators will now have to decide whether the network’s headline coverage figure describes homes protected — or boxes on a register.
