The end of an Era : India bids the telegram farewel

[third eye]

One recalls the sense of dread & trepidation when the bell rang at night and the man called out " Taar Aya hai". The household froze till it was ripped from its Pink envelope and read - to celebrate or cry depending on the contents.

College meant waiting for the Telegraphic Money order from home asking the postman to keep quiet lest the hostel got to know one has received money from home followed by the deluge of ' friends'.

All memories now.


The end of an era: India bids the telegram farewell - DAWN.COM


NEW DELHI: Sixty-six years ago, Santosh Sharma saw her mother sell gold bangles to feed and clothe her family of six and then dispatch telegrams to her brothers urging them to leave newly-created Pakistan and gather in New Delhi.

“Come, we will all live in India,” wrote Sharma's mother, Devika.

As the only literate woman in the family, Devika was entrusted with the task of sending the messages to distant family members and fellow Hindu friends.

The family finally reunited in the Indian capital after countless exchanges, escaping the religious violence which claimed up to a million lives following the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.

“Crossing the border meant risking your own life,” Santosh Sharma told AFP, remembering the tense period of post-partition India. “At that time the telegram was the only way to keep families informed, give speedy updates and reunite.”

After 162 years of connecting people, India is now set to disband the world's last major telegram service and its legions of cycle-borne delivery workers. With the service made redundant by a technological revolution, the final message will be sent next Monday, July 15.

In the days before mobile phones and the Internet, the telegram network was the main form of communication, with 20 million messages dispatched from India in 1947 alone.

In 2012, the number of telegrams dwindled to 40,000 and most of them were by Indian government departments conveying administrative messages to remote parts of the country.

A colonial legacy

India's first telegraph lines were laid by British rulers in 1851 in the colonial capital of Kolkata (Calcutta at the time), stretching about 25 miles (40 kilometres) down the Hoogly River to a key harbour on the Bay of Bengal.

By the turn of the century, 125,000 miles of wire had been unrolled and the service was used for much more than trade and commerce and employed thousands of educated Indians.

Its messages, always hand-delivered, announced court judgements, transfers, arrivals, births, weather, war and business transactions as well as the most dreaded news of all – deaths.

Known locally as the “Taar” (wire), the service is also remembered for helping the British trading conglomerate the East India Company maintain its political and military domination of the region.

When Indian troops rebelled in 1857, sparking a widespread uprising against colonial rule, the telegram is credited with playing a crucial rule in helping British forces mobilise and regain control.

R.K. Rai, a retired telegraph operator in New Delhi, remembers the service in its pomp as hundreds of workers crashed out the dots and dashes of Morse Code used on telegraph machines.

“The whole office sounded like a factory,” he remembers. “Sometimes we felt we knew every significant detail of our customer's lives,” he said. “The word privacy did not exist in anyone's dictionary then.” Rai retired from the department in 2006 and he regularly visits his former workplace, the Central Telegraph Office, built in a white colonial style in the centre of the capital.

It send out less than 10 messages a day on average, though recent publicity about the imminent closure of the office has led dozens of people to send one last message, each costing 9 rupees (15 cents) per word as a memento.

Only 75 telegraph offices remain nation-wide, employing less than 1,000 telegraph operators.

When the telegraph offices close this month, the workers will be absorbed into other departments in the communications ministry.

Today, Rai like the rest of the mobile-toting country says he prefers using his phone to send messages. “The new technology is so fast it just surprises me. Communication is a game of speed, the fastest will always win the game,” he said. “Eventually the telegraph system had to face defeat.”

 

[Manindra]

I didn't use are even see the Telegram in my life but it is a rule of the nature that new technology replace old technology.
R.I.P. Telegram

 

[T90TankGuy]

I remember the days of the telegram , i used to wait in line to send one also who can forget that if you wanted to place a trunk call you had to go the the telegraph office

 

[kena]

Sad...but all things must ultimately pass into the sunset.

 

[third eye]

I remember the days of the telegram , i used to wait in line to send one also who can forget that if you wanted to place a trunk call you had to go the the telegraph office:)

Arre..

That was another experience. One went after dinner - the waiting was so much.

 

[T90TankGuy]

Some how i always feel that the 80s were the best years to grow up in . we could ride our cycles to school without worrying about getting run over . early morning was nice and beautiful with a clean crisp air. though only some had phones in their homes we all stayed in contact . with 40 approaching fast i long for my teens

 

[RPK]

Last post at the telegraph office - The Hindu


As skeleton staff keeps vigil, a band of dedicated users continues to send telegrams

The few staff members who man the Central Telegraph Office (CTO) on Second Line Beach Road, Parrys, are suddenly busy booking telegrams of a different nature.

One such message was booked by a staff member over phone: ‘Dear Srini the telegraph office is closing down from July 15. I feel sad- Shanthi’. The CTO is the only place that offers the phonogram services in Chennai.

Even as the government has decided to suspend telegram and phonogram services from mid-July, the 129-year-old red building still receives customers who want to use the service, which is on its last legs, as often as possible. Seventy five-year-old S. Arumugam, a regular visitor, said: “I send telegrams to Madras High Court and government officials. I have booked telegrams for even Rs.3,000. I don’t know what I’ll do when the services are stopped.”

There was a time when the gates of the CTO were never closed and inside, the hallways resounded with hundreds of teleprinters at work round the clock. Now, the activity is confined to the ground floor of the three-storey heritage structure built in Indo-Saracenic style.

Administrative work is carried out in the first floor while the second and third floors have been unoccupied for years as the structure built in 1884 has not been repaired in decades. The number of staff has dwindled from 1,000 in the early 1990s to less than 150. Of them, only 30 are involved in booking telegrams. The CTO, which was once the hub for telegrams, has diversified into a telecom customer service centre.

Employees recall the CTO had a daily traffic of 1.25 lakh telegrams in the 1990s when the minimum charge was Rs.3.50. Everything from wedding greetings and interview calls to the weather forecast was sent via telegram. Newspapers used to call the CTO before closing edition.

“We now send and receive nearly 350 telegrams and phonograms daily. We rarely get telegrams with greeting or condolence messages. It’s mainly banks, finance companies, and advocates that make use of the service now,” said a staff member. Today, only three telegraph men deliver telegrams where 140 messengers used to work in seven shifts in the late 90s.

A messenger, who covered Kilpauk area, recalled the challenges he faced while delivering news to ‘banglas’(bungalow), especially during the night. “We had to collect recipients’ signature and it was particularly difficult if the news was tragic,” he said.

The museum at the Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Telecom Training Centre, Meenambakkam, has preserved the Morse Key and the Dubern Sounder, a relic from another era. Over time, the Morse Key and Sounder, also called Dubern Sounder, gave way to teleprinters. Now, telegrams are sent using a web-based Telegraph Message system.

 

[Saleem]

is there still telegram in pakistan? if not, whrn gig it stop?

 

[Parul]

Dear Telegram, with you goes down an era. A generation will miss you forever! Adieu!

 

[xTra]

Still my dad has preserved the telegram he received "" Mother Serious come soon.

 

[bornmoron]

The present generations doesnt know anything about "Trunk Calls", Telegrams,,,,,now its mobile n sms,,,,,

sooner "Money Order" will be followed

 

[Aka123]

Telegram service in country to close at 9 pm today

New Delhi: The 160-year old telegram service in the country will operate for the last time today.

"Tomorrow is the last day for telegram services. The service will start at 8 am and close by 9 pm," BSNL CMD R K Upadhyay told PTI on Saturday. "The service will not be available from Monday."

State-run telecom firm BSNL has decided to discontinue telegrams following a huge shortfall in revenue. The service generated about Rs. 75 lakh annually, compared with the cost of over Rs. 100 crore to run and manage it.

The use of telegrams has declined with the spread of mobile phones and the Internet in the country.

The first experimental electric telegraph line was started between Kolkata and Diamond Harbour in 1850 and it was opened for use by the British East India Company the following year. In 1854, the service was made available to the public.

There are about 75 telegram centres in the country, with less than 1,000 employees to manage them.

BSNL will absorb these employees and deploy them to manage mobile services, landline telephony and broadband services.

Faced with declining revenue, the government had revised telegram charges in May 2011, after a gap of 60 years. Charges for inland telegram services were hiked to Rs. 27 per 50 words.

Telegram service in country to close at 9 pm today | NDTV.com

 

[third eye]

Telegrams STOP: End of service delivering joy and heartache

BBC News - Telegrams STOP: End of service delivering joy and heartache

The last telegram will be sent on Sunday night as the country's state-run telegraph service shuts down. It has been in decline for decades, but once touched the lives of millions of Indians ever year, writes Geeta Pandey.

As a child growing up in Calcutta in the 1970s and 1980s, I always felt a sense of foreboding every time a knock on the door announced the arrival of a telegram.

My parents would be visibly worried as telegrams usually brought bad news, like the death of a relative. They would imagine the worst about their elderly parents in rural Uttar Pradesh until the square piece of paper reassured them that all was well back in the village.

For decades the main source of reliable and urgent communication, telegrams brought happy and sad news to millions of Indians every year.

The telegraph service started in 1851 when the British East India Company built a 30-mile (48km) electric telegraph line from the city of Calcutta to its suburb of Diamond Harbour, primarily for official use.

Over the next few years, telegraph lines were expanded to cover the entire country and in 1855, the service was opened for public use.

Its success was instant, says CV Gopinath, the former deputy director general of telegraph services.

The 1857 rebellion against the British, often described as the first war of India's independence, "failed because of this telegraph technology", he says. "Lord Dalhousie [the governor-general] once said that the telegraph saved India."

It meant they could order the mobilisation of troops and resources quickly and confidentially.

For more than a century thereafter, up until the end of the 1980s, telegrams were the fastest and most reliable form of communication.

In the early days, telegrams arrived written by hand with fountain pens, and mostly carried business messages. Today, a telegram is a computer printout.

It is the advent of newer, more modern technology that killed demand for telegraph services. The company has been losing billions of rupees a year. The last telegram will be sent at 22:00 India time (16:30 GMT) on Sunday 14 July.

"The new generation doesn't even know about telegrams," says Shameem Akhtar, senior general manager at the state-run telecommunications firm, BSNL.

Vedachalam Ethiraj has a collection of more than 2,000 telegrams, at least 100 of them sent between 1854 and 1860. "Telegrams have played an important role in my life." He received a lot of congratulatory greetings telegrams for his wedding as that was the only way his family and friends abroad could get in touch more than 20 years ago. And in 1986, he sent out telegrams to his relatives to announce his grandmother's death.

Ethiraj cannot read English but his grown-up children - two sons and a daughter read them out: "We wonder about the places the messages are from or the people who sent them.

"Telegrams had a place in history, but it was inevitable that emails or text messages replaced them. Something else will replace emails too one day. That's how these things work, but I have so many that I can treasure."

At the Central Telegraph Office in Delhi's Eastern Court building, not far from India's parliament, the mood is clearly downbeat.

Jagdish Chand, who was a telegram messenger for 31 years, points to the row of offices at the back of the building and says: "More than 4,000 people worked here. There were hundreds of teleprinter machines and the room was generally so noisy that you had to shout in the ears of the person sitting next to you to be heard."

The machines are all gone, sold as scrap, and the the offices have fallen quiet, with only a handful of people around.

Om Dutt, who has been delivering telegrams since 1983, says he used to deliver 30-40 messages a day in the 1980s, but now manages less than half of that. "Then, it used to be like day even at night at the telegraph office, because there would be so many people, so many cars, bright lights."
Om Dutt has been delivering messages since 1983 Om Dutt has been delivering messages since 1983

Fellow messenger Jagdish Chand adds: "Our work never stopped. It didn't matter whether it was raining or whether it was the 43C summer heat or the peak of winter - we went out to deliver telegrams whatever the weather."

In 1984, soon after Dutt and Chand started delivering telegrams, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated.

"We got so many telegrams for Mrs Gandhi's house from all over the world, I had to deliver them in a sack," says Dutt.

"We received 7,000 to 8,000 telegrams a day," says Chand. "People everywhere had heard about the anti-Sikh riots [which broke out after Mrs Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards] and they were worried about their relatives and were trying to get in touch with them."

For three days, he says, they slept in their offices. "It was not safe to go out, but we wore our uniforms, had our identity cards and if we were stopped by the police, they would let us go because we were treated as emergency service workers."

Their work was not easy. "In some areas, people thought that telegrams were bringing bad news and they would pelt the messengers with stones. In one instance, some people threw a glass bottle at us," he says.

Mr Chand is obviously unhappy at the government's decision to stop telegrams.

"When I joined the telegraph service, I was a young man of 20. I married here, had children, sent them to school. This has been like my home. I have a couple of years to retire, but now my future's uncertain."

The authorities have said all of the nearly 1,000 workers will be redeployed, but Mr Chand still doesn't know where he will end up.

As the end of the service approaches, there has been a last-minute rush of telegrams for staff to sort and stamp, ready for delivery.

People from across the country have sent hundreds of telegrams over the past ten days to Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal, pleading with him to save the service.


Others, resigned that this is the end of the service as they know it, are rushing to send their last telegram.

Bulbul Tewari, 73, is filling in forms to send telegrams to her four grandchildren, aged between seven and 14, "so that when they are older, they realise that this is the way messages were sent, once upon a time".

One of those final messages from someone wishing to mark the end of the almost 160-year-old service simply says: "TELEGRAM IS DEAD. LONG LIVE TELEGRAM."

STOP