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 years old, going to the pages of history.
Share with the world !!
For a technology that now seems rudimentary at best, the telegraph was in fact a truly radical and discontinuous innovation that marked the beginning of the Information Age.
Droped
It is better to release a postal stamp to bid warm farewell to telegram services n include a lesson about history of telegram in primary schools.
Nageswara rao, kvs, Hyderabad.