Deutsche Welle, 17 July 2013
Millions of
people relied on it for decades. But now India's state-run telegram service has
come to an end. Authorities felt telegrams were no longer commercially viable
in a fast-growing age of digital communications.
It served
as the harbinger of good and bad news for generations of Indians. The telegram
conveyed the birth of a child, a death, and greetings on birthdays and
festivals. But the curtains finally came down on the iconic 163-year-old Indian
telegram service, on July 15th.
The service
closed because of mounting financial losses and becoming redundant in an era of
mobile phones and the Internet. "The losses were getting bigger. It was
not practical to have kept it going much longer. We lost $250 million US
dollars in the last seven years and it was time to put an end to the
service," said Shameem Akhtar, general manager at the Bharat Sanchar
Nigam, which runs India's telegram service.
One last
telegram
To
commemorate the last day, thousands crammed into telegraph offices across the
country to send souvenir messages to family and friends before the service
passed into the annals of history. The last recorded telegram was sent to
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi.
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The state-run telegram service was closed due to increasing financial losses |
"It is
indeed a sad day for me. I have sent thousands of telegrams in my 35 years
working in this small, dingy office. I even started typing up messages on
computers to be sent via telegraph, instead of using Morse code," Madan
Gopal, a telegraph operator in Delhi told DW.
Known
popularly as "Taar" or wire, the telegram service, which provided
millions with a fast and reliable mode of communication, began in 1850, when
the first trial telegraph line was established between Kolkata and Diamond
Harbour, a southern suburb nearly 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the city
center. The British East India Company then started using the telegraph a year
later, and by 1854, lines had been laid across the country.
By 1856,
the network stretched 4000 miles across the British Raj, connecting the
strategically vital cities of Kolkata, Agra, Bombay, Peshawar, and Madras. "It certainly played an important role
in the independence struggle and research shows that back in those days freedom
fighters in the forefront of the movement used to cut the telegram lines to
stop the British from communicating," sociologist Dipankar Gupta told DW.
From
telegrams to smartphones
At its peak
in 1985, the service sent 600,000 telegrams a day across India and had a
network of 45,000 telegraph offices. Countless remote towns and villages across
the country depended on the telegram for getting news where telephones were
rare. Most telegraph workers criss-crossed inhospitable terrain to deliver the
messages.
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Experts say the telegram played an important in the Indian struggle for independence |
But with
the arrival of the e-mail and reliable landline phones, the days of the
telegram were counted. According to estimates, there are now over 850 million
mobile phone subscribers and over 160 million Internet users in India. A recent
study by Cisco has claimed that India has the fastest Internet traffic growth
in the world, and that the number is expected to grow to 348 million users by
2017.
India is
only the latest country to bid goodbye to the telegram. In the US, the main
service provided by Western Union was shut down in 2006. Over the past decade,
several countries have also phased out telegram services. The closing of the
world's last major commercial telegram service marks an end of an era.
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