Prank calls and bus journeys

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Many people don’t realize that the 108 ambulance service in India was invented and propogated by Mr. B Ramalinga Raju of erstwhile Satyam Computers. He may have been at folly with his self admitted creative accounting but nobody should deny him the credit for creating a service that has saved, by now, more than a lakh of lives. The call statistics for the Tamil Nadu call centre were published in the Hindu today.  See  (http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Chennai/article2614182.ece)

It reminded me of an argument I had with my colleague in the 90’s. He would catch a bus to go to his home town every weekend returning by Monday morning. I said he did this only because the bus service was there and not because there was a need for him to travel. I said that majority of the travelers were doing so out of choice and the availability of the bus rather than the necessity to make the journey for personal or official work. I further stated that I would prove to him that what I said was true. Making use of a group of students from the Madras Institute of Technology interviews of passengers booking long and short journey tickets was conducted. The results were collated, entered and I proved my point. 80% of the travelers had no official or personal work that necessitated travel. I even published a small article based on the results saying that subsidies on the operation of these buses should go. On seeing the article I got a call from one of the members of the PPST group who commented “It is precisely for that reason that there should be the subsidy on travel. Imagine the havoc these people could potentially cause if they were not traveling”.

The staff at EMRI should take heart, on an average EMRI in Chennai receives 25,000 calls and 85% are nuisance/abusive or prank calls. The valiant staff at EMRI has prevented those 85% of callers from creating even greater havoc. It is just like switching channels on TV. 80% is junk you would never watch and about 20% tolerable. The EMRI example is a classic one for the Pareto principle.  “The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

In the case of EMRI 80% of the ambulance movement is based on 20% of the calls.