BSNL deciding to discontinue the 160-year-old telegraph service from July 15
As per a circular issued by Shameem Akhtar, Sr. General Manager (Telegraph Services) Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL),the telegraph service , which delivered a lot of happy and sad news to people across the country, is to be discontinued with effect from July 15. As a result of Telecommunication boom; India has announced it will be shutting down all telegraph services as of July 15. Though the telegram may seem like an out-dated technology in the age of smart phones, SMS (texting) and email, some critics of the shut-down in India point out that in many rural, poorer areas of the country it has remained a vital form of communication.
According to BSNL authorities, the decision was taken in consultation with the Government of India and Department of Posts. “Since the telegraph service has become not commercially viable, we approached the government. But the government asked the BSNL board to decide on it. Department of Posts authorities are of the opinion that there are better options,” a source said. It is not a sudden decision. There was a proposal to stop the service last year itself. The public sector telecom company is planning to redeploy surplus telegraph staff members to other sections such as landline phone and broadband services and their shifting could take place in the next three months. It was in May 2011 that the government revised telegraph charges after a gap of 60 years.
“Even after the introduction of… Internet, STD and e-mail, telegrams are still used by military personnel for official use and also for contacting their families from remote locations… Many banks and State governments are still utilizing the service. Telegrams are also treated as most authentic… in legal matters and official records. At least, minimum service should be maintained in the interests of the people who are still using it,” Forum convener has said. He tried hard to persuade Mr. Sibal to hold discussions with unions before taking a final decision.Mr. Sibal has said the telegram service will get a “ceremonial farewell.” “We will bid it a very warm farewell, and maybe the last telegram sent should be a museum piece. That is the way in which we can bid it a warm farewell,” he said on Thursday.
First it was the pigeon post and now the Telegram called as “Taar” in India. Tracing the roots of Indian telegraphy reveals so many interesting insights on how the system developed In India. The first telegraph message was transmitted live between Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Diamond Harbour, a distance of 50 km, on November 5, 1850; and the service was opened for the public in February 1851.The British East India Company started using the telegraph a year later, and by 1854—telegraph lines had been laid across the country. The telegraph continued to thrive, in India and around the world, even after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876. For more than half a century, telegrams were sent over cable lines, but in 1902 (capitalizing on the work of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi) the Indian system went wireless. The Indian postal and telecom sectors are one of the world’s oldest departments in India. These departments got the public attraction by the introduction of Telegraph.
In India, as in the rest of the world, a trend toward digital communications that began with the advent of the digital computer in the 1960s, increasingly threatened the continued relevance of the telegraph. By the 1980s, the analog facsimile telegraph, perfected in the 1930s and used to send information over telephone and telegraph lines, was replaced by the digital fax machine. Fax—and later email—began to eclipse telegrams, regular mail and other earlier communications systems, a process that only accelerated with the rise of the Internet. Over the years, BSNL made several upgrades, the latest being the web-based messaging system introduced in 2010.
India Post has abandoned the telegram, product of a rhythmic language of keys that American painter Samuel Morse believed he immortalized with the first telegraphic message, "What hath God wrought," he sent from Washington DC to Baltimore on May 24, 1844.The first telegraph stamps were issued in 1860. Today, collectors find it hard to come by these stamps and may even have to sell out lakhs of rupees for one. In addition, Indian courts had previously accepted only telegrams and telegram receipts as proof of evidence in civil or criminal suits.
Any meaningful form of communication was slow, so slow that by the time one received and replied things could have changed dramatically. This is truly an End of an Era; Closure of an important communication service; Telegram-160 yea
