General manager Sinha concurs with this view, but says that they are trying to recover losses by procuring government subsidy under the Universal Service Obligation Fund (Usof). Set up by the government in 2002 to fund communication in rural areas, since these are largely overlooked by market players, Usof revenues come from charging telecom operators 5% of their annual income.
“This is an essential service, and so we sent a request for the subsidy in April. We are awaiting an answer,” Sinha explains. The telegraph department currently posts a loss of around Rs250 crore a year.
Also, from the current 4,000 offices, the department plans to scale down to 1,000 offices within the next couple of years. The number could be reduced even further. The department had a staff strength of 35,000 at one time, but with direct recruitment being stopped in 1984, most employees are nearing retirement.
“We will have people in the department till 2015… I don’t know after that. Maybe it will be time to close down the service by then,” says Sinha.
Despite the bleak outlook, Gopinath remains optimistic. He says that if one values the real estate assets owned by the telegraph department, no one would call it a loss-making body. “We have prime land and bungalows in all the major cities in the country. If we were to simply rent this land and the bungalows out, the department can post profits in lakhs and crores,” he contends.
Much of this real estate, however, has been taken over by the telephone department as part of the decades of consolidation, de-mergers and mergers in the communication services.
Currently, the telegraph system seems to be surviving only on a sense of obligation to the poor man, and a belief that it, being a government service, still holds some sanctity in the mind of the common man.
The memories
Gopinath remembers a time when the telegraph system made some inadvertent blunders. “In the 1970s, we once sent a telegram meant for Mount Abu to Abu Dhabi. And then a message that should have gone to Belgaum landed up in Belgium.” The veteran’s anecdote of choice however is the time a maharaja wired for his ‘darbar’, asking to be receive at the railway station. Instead the royal highness found his ‘barber’ waiting for him.
Suranchal, on her part, remembers the office atmosphere during the late 1980s and early 1990s as being “very noisy, with the collective sharp sound of the telegraph keys being struck from every corner of the central office”. Today, Delhi CTO is a quiet place by day and virtually empty at night. “Only one or two people sit here now in the night shift,” says sub-divisional engineer A.S. Chauhan. The pony-tailed Chauhan says there was a time when 300 people used to work in the office day and night.
The introduction to Krishnalal Shridharani’s 1953 chronicle of the first 100 years of the Indian telegraph was written by Jagjivan Ram, then minister for communications. In it, he pays rich tribute to the tireless efforts of the employees to build the network over areas that are “difficult and impassable in jungle and hill areas”.
His introduction closes with the lines: “The future of communications in India, therefore, lies in not only making all Indian citizens more comfortable and informed but also making them more vital representatives of … the Indian genius.”