Dear Comrades,
The telegram or taar, once the bearer of urgent news, good or bad, will disappear once and for all on July 15, outpaced in the age of text messages and emails.
The telegraphic service began in India in 1850 — by cable, later wireless — but what spurred the Indian telecom revolution has eventually been overtaken by it. A cash-strapped BSNL, which took over telegraphy from the postal department, raised charges two years ago, from Rs 4 for 50 words to Rs 50. Two months ago, international telegrams were done away with and now, the domestic taar is set to go too.
It's the end of an era. The last telegram — popularly called taar that was once loved and feared as the bearer of good and bad news — will be sent on July 15. After that, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has decided to discontinue the service which started the Indian telecom revolution in 1850.
In 1990s, BSNL took charge of the telegram services from the department of posts. With SMSs, emails, fax and smart phones rendering the telegram redundant in the past few years, struggling-to-survive BSNL that is likely to notch up losses of over Rs 17,000 crore in the past two fiscals can no longer afford the luxury of continuing this service.
Despite losses, BSNL had in the recent past made two last-ditch attempts to ensure that the 163-year-old legacy lived on. The state-run utility had raised telegraph charges in 2011 — after a gap of 60 years — when telegraphing 50 words within the country was priced at Rs 50 instead of Rs 4 earlier. But with few takers, this price hike could not make the service viable for the loss-making PSU. Two months ago, it had discontinued international telegrams.
After all this tinkering did not help, BSNL asked the government to support the commercially unviable product but was instead told to take a closer look at to find out it was still needed in today's world. After consultation with the department of post, BSNL decided to discontinue this service with a circular being issued by its senior GM (telegraph services) Shameem Akhtar.
A senior BSNL official said: "The telegram had lost its relevance. The basic idea of a taar was to send a message fast. Now SMS, fax and emails do that job. With smart phones, people send and receive emails on the move. So when we sought government support to keep the telegram alive, we were asked to decide its fate on a commercial basis and hence will now be discontinuing the service."
The telegraph staff are now going to be shifted to the British era taar's modern day successors like mobile services, landline telephony and broadband services over the next few months. "In the past few years, a majority of the staff were not just booking telegraphs because of falling demand. Telegraph centers were converted to customer service centers where they were taking requests for new connections ; accepting payments and taking complaints. All the staff will be redeployed within BSNL," the official said.
The story of Indian telecom began with the telegraph when the first experimental electric telegraph line was started between Calcutta and Diamond Harbour in 1850. A year later, the British East India Company started using it. Over the next four years, telegraph lines were laid across the country and the service was made available to the public in 1854. Till 1902, telegraphs were sent by cables after which it went the wireless way.
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
