A police officer said the operation to track, retrieve and return the stolen handsets has been going on for the past four months. And it had been far from easy. As they were trying to trace these phones, officers found that some of them were now in far-off places like Kolkata, West Bengal, and North-Eastern states. The police simply do not have the resources to go all the way there to recover them in person. When the officers contacted some of the present owners and informed that they were from Tamil Nadu police, the response was mixed: some agreed to send the equipment by courier, but some others switched off the phones making it impossible to track them further. And even after retrieving them, the officer added, it took the police about a month to match the details of the retrieved phones with the owner’s particulars.

In the end, was it worth it? Yes, say the public. When this reporter asked a woman if her phone was working fine, she said “although the display was damaged to an extent that I was unsure if it could be repaired at all, I’m happy that the police put in some effort and retrieved my phone for me”.