India's 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.