“Namaste, one zero eight.”

I’m in Hyderabad, watching what could be a cartoon cliché of Indian economic growth. An obviously intelligent young woman in a sari, wearing a headset, is methodically handling distant requests from her seat in a brightly lit call center. But this isn’t a destination for frustrated software users, or people who have lost their credit cards: It’s India’s first emergency services hotline, the equivalent of our 911. Armed with software that tracks the real-time locations of a bevy of emergencies and a fleet of ambulances (and can also refer calls to police and fire departments), the phone jockeys here are saving lives—and setting a new standard for technologically savvy emergency management.

The Indian number, 108, is notable for its auspicious numerology: one to the first, times two to the second, times three to the third. There are 108 beads in Buddhist and Taoist rosaries. Hindu deities have 108 names. And most importantly, the number is reserved throughout India’s sprawling telephone infrastructure.

In the program’s recently-completed first year of operation, its handful of operators issued their multicultural greeting (“namaste” means hello in nearly all of India’s hundreds of languages and dialects) several million times. The 25 million people who live in the area currently covered by the hotline represent only a third of the population in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where it operates. Andhra Pradesh itself has less than seven percent of India’s 1.1 billion people. But the program promises to be scalable: With 70 ambulances in its fleet, organizers peg the cost at just ten rupees per person per annum. Covering everyone in India, assuming no further economies of scale, would cost $250 million a year—which is, to give some perspective, less than five hours’ worth of the annual U.S. military budget.

The Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI), which operates the hotline, is already talking to other Indian states about expanding its program. The operation is vertically integrated—EMRI owns and operates the ambulances as well as the hotline, and gets hospitals, many of which are private, to promise that they will provide emergency care first and seek payment only once patients are stabilized.

The Indian program doesn’t provide anything like the level of coverage we are used to in America. There are 357,000 people for each ambulance in the coverage area, compared with 5,800 people for each ambulance in the United States. When all of its ambulances are engaged, EMRI is forced to offer callers apologies rather than on-the-ground help. Most of its current coverage area is urban, and the current mean time of 34 minutes from first call to hospital arrival is certain to go up as the program scales to cover a larger portion of the country’s lackluster rural road network.

Nonetheless, EMRI CEO Venkat Changavalli is a preternatural optimist. He got the program up and running in a matter of months, after touring the world in search of best practices, and its infrastructure is impressive: moving ambulances can send real-time electrocardiogram readings to the call center, where several physicians are on hand at all times. The software that keeps track of calls and response resources was developed by Satyam, an Indian IT firm. (Full disclosure: My visit to the call center was part of an international tour for western journalists, organized and paid for by Satyam and another firm, Sify.) All this technology helps EMRI make efficient use of its limited resources. The future for funding looks bright, since the prospect of saving some lives through emergency management is both politically and morally attractive, even if a better-resourced program could do more.

It’s not likely, alas, that the innovative computer infrastructure at the Indian call center will be appearing stateside any time soon. Changavalli explained to me that cultural and practical factors insulate the new emergency service, which is operated with government support, from liability risks. The idea of an “ambulance chasing” attorney is mercifully foreign in India. That fact may have helped persuade Satyam to tackle the problem in the first place. In any case, I am told, the legal climate mooted whatever interest Satyam might otherwise have had in seeking a U.S. market for its innovations.

David Robinson is managing editor of The American.