Telegram services in India shuts down on July 14

[ghpk]

telegram was an important tool in the early 80's in places were landlines had not penetrated. i have faint memories of my family receiving and transmitting telegram to the native place
in last 25 years i haven't seen anybody using telegram personally. it should have been discarded a decade ago

I've seen lots of them in my house during my child hood, Even though we had Landline phone since late 60's but information like child birth, illness of elderly people often came via "Telegram" or " TAAR" and it was mostly a heart Throbbing till we read the entire content.
STD Calls thru Phone were booked, and sometimes took 1-2 days to get through, and if the number was P.P.(Padosi Pareshan) it didn't solved the purpose .
Mostly my grand parents sent it or their neighbours sent it from Ghaziabad, when my nana ji/nani ji were already in ICU for a day or two, and next thing I remember after this was Railway Station, parents looking for reservation and Booking Clerk with HUGE SIZED Reservation Registers, (Sorry for posting this personal memory, but Seeing telegram going offline, I couldn't stop myself)
I remember seeing those "Morse Code" tapping machine at local post offices in 1980's where the employee sent the messages and interpreted the incoming taps.
However this did have lot of spelling mistakes.
Certainly this service is no longer used by anyone who has access to phone/sms and emails.
However I am little concerned about villages where this was still the only mode of private/urgent communication, may god give those families means to afford a phone cause rural rivalries does still exists in India and people there still do-not-co-operate, no matter how needy one may be.

 

[Sushubh]

BJP on Saturday's slammed the Centre's decision to discontinue the 160-year-old telegram service from July 15 saying it was the first step at weakening the postal department and demanded that it be restored."Private courier agencies and top brass in the government machinery are trying to weaken the postal service. This is the first step towards that goal," BJP National Executive Council member K Rajendran said at nearby Mayiladuthurai.

http://www.readability.com/articles/n9obtkxq
Rs. 100 crores expenditure. Rs. 75 lakhs revenue generation. I do not get it... How can it be so unprofitable.

 

[ashish]

it's not that they have to spend crores maintaining the infrastructure.

 

[Sushubh]

Exactly. Use SMS for message delivery and existing postmen for delivery to receiver!

 

[Citrus]

[font="sans-serif;font-size:13px;"]Message delivery is via SMS is “[/font]best effort[font="sans-serif;font-size:13px;"],” so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient.[/font]

 

[Sushubh]

So, it shuts down tomorrow.

The 160-year old telegram service in the country will operate for the last time tomorrow."Tomorrow is the last day for telegram services. The service will start at 8 am and close by 9 pm," BSNL CMD R K Upadhyay told PTI. "The service will not be available from Monday."
State-run telecom firm BSNL has decided to discontinue telegrams following a huge shortfall in revenue.

 

[goodburner]

My mom worked in the BSNL Telegram Dept.

I have also never received or sent Telegram, used to only write them in English exams.
The telegram lived for 160 years, but I doubt E-mail, Facebook, SMS, etc would live that long.

 

[Sushubh]

Ask her if she knows how popular they still are. I mean any estimation on how many are processed through her office on a weekly/monthly basis?

 

[sarkar007]

http://www.mid-day.com/news/2013/jul/140713-forty-seven-telegram-in-a-day.htm

 

[popcorn]

Bye Telegram. It was nice way for 19th & 20th Century people to remain connected.
Telegram, you could have survived, if you had put a sms system in between and lowered cost.
A Person sends a telegram to reciepient... post office converts the telegram to sms and sends a sms to the other post office.
The other post office again converts the sms to telegram and sends the real telegram to the recipient.