Authored by Krishnalal Shridharani, the book paints an optimistic view of the future of the telegraph in India. At the time, Shridharani says in a section called The Superlatives, the Indian telegraph department had the sixth largest inland traffic in the world and third longest mileage for telegraph transmission. And the book is confident about the system’s ability to grow, improve and take its services to the citizen “to his door in the remote village”.
However, the telegraph, after a flurry of activity in the 1980s, would eventually fail to live up to the promises of the first hundred years of its existence.
During the golden years of the 1980s, when the telegraph service was at its peak, “more than 100,000 telegrams per day were sent and received only in the Delhi main office. Now, it’s barely 100,000 a day, nationally,” says Deepak Sinha, general manager, telegraph services.
Sinha works out of the CTO in Delhi. Situated on the Capital’s arterial Janpath, the office is housed in Eastern Court, a courthouse during the Raj era.
Echoing Sinha’s sentiment is Suranchal, who joined the services as a telegraphist in 1983. Suranchal, who goes by only one name, remembers the time when a telegraphist’s job was both prestigious and difficult to get. “Earlier, all telegraphists had to undergo a training for nine months before they would be put on to the machines. And an applicant had to get at least first division in their matriculate exams. At that time, getting more than 60% was a huge thing.”
Currently, Suranchal works as the personal assistant to R.P. Gond, chief superintendent at CTO in Delhi. “Now, there is no more work,” she says. A far cry from the days when telegraphists used to compete with each other to send telegrams.
“During the 1980s and 1990s, we had to complete a quota of 220 telegrams a day—110 sent and 110 received. There was an incentive for every telegram sent or received above that,” reminisces Suranchal. Star performers often typed out more than 1,200 telegrams in a day.
But once traffic dropped, employees such as Suranchal were reassigned.
Bigger and better...in vain
What makes the downturn even more painful for Gopinath is the fact that even in the face of this steady decline, efforts to improve technology and service have continued.
In 1981, the Indian telegraph system adopted the store and forward transmission (SFT) system and then in the early 1990s, the store and forward message switching system (SFMSS). The SFT appended a destination code to telegrams so that they could be relayed without human intervention. Later, the SFMSS removed dependence on physical wired links by using overhead transmission towers, set up 40km apart.
“In the case where the telegram had to reach smaller towns, the message would be transmitted overhead as far as it could go, and then it would be transferred on to the underground wires, most of which existed from the pre-independence era, along railway tracks,” Gopinath explains.
Gopinath recalls that a single scathing article in The Hindu newspaper in the 1980s was enough to jolt the department into action and in 1986, it started taking steps towards modernization and customer service. “We started monitoring the quality of service in 1986, how many telegrams are delivered in 12 hours. It grew from 42% to 97% with modernization, in a span of three years,” he says.