The End of an Era - India and the last telegram
Never visited India but really want to someday. From the
Christian Science Monitor:
India to send world's last telegram. Stop.
At the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India's state-owned telecom company, a message emerges from a dot matrix printer addressing a soldier's Army unit in Delhi. "GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION," it reads. It's one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by telegram � a format favored for its "sense of urgency and authenticity," explains a BSNL official.
But the days of such communication are numbered: The world's last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on July 14.
That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, telegraph services were introduced by William O'Shaughnessy, a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for the first time in 1850 to send a message.
Some more:
At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.
One of them is R.D. Ram, who has been working in the Delhi office for 38 years. "They will now move me to another department where I will feel like a fresher [beginner]," he complains.
Mr. Ram once learned the Morse code technology for telegraphy, but today oversees staff who type out and send telegrams over a Web software. He tries to put up a spirited defense of the obsolete technology in the age of the smartphone, arguing that mobile penetration is much lower than it is hyped to be. Mobile penetration is indeed a dismal 26 percent, but even in the remotest village, at least someone has a phone.
Ram notes that the telegram has legal benefits as well. "It is still accepted by the courts as a valid form of evidence. And is taken seriously by a judge when a government official sends a telegram to say he is unwell and cannot be present in court today," he says.
What
God hath wrought passes from the face of this earth.
Posted by DaveH at June 15, 2013 9:08 PM