Twilight of India’s Telegram Operators

Sanjeev Gupta/European Pressphoto Agency An employee of the National Telecom Museum in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, sitting behind an 1871 model of a telegraphic code machine invented by French engineer Emile Baudot.

On Saturday afternoon, Vikrant Deshpande, a 32-year-old Indian Air Force pilot, drove with his wife to the Central Telegram Office in New Delhi. The newly married couple gazed at a sign in the Telegram Office lobby that read, “Standard Phrases for Greeting Telegrams.”

The Deshpandes scribbled messages and proceeded to send each other souvenir telegrams before the 163-year-old service is shut down in July. “We want to send each other our last and best telegrams,” said Mr. Deshpande.

Inside the Central Telegram Office, the air was humid with apprehension and despair. A vast majority of the telegram service workers are in their 50s, many a few years from retirement. And they are nervous about their jobs in the post-telegram world.

R.K. Goyal, a 58-year-old telegraph operator, is retiring in 2015. On the afternoon of June 12, when he was busy transcribing government wires, a circular came from Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, a state-owned telecommunications company, that announced the end of countrywide telegram operations. It didn’t surprise him. He’d been hearing about it for the last three months.

“Technically they are not firing us,” Mr. Goyal said. “We will be asked to do a different kind of work in some other department, but we all will be obsolete.”

A shy, bespectacled man with a thin moustache, Mr. Goyal began his career in 1975 as a junior wire operator. In the mid-1970s, his department was at its zenith: customers waited in long lines, operators worked overtime, and messengers carrying large bundles of wires furiously pedaled their bicycles throughout the city. Customers would shout, plead and offer tips to telegraph workers to get a message transmitted.

Mr. Goyal lived with a sense of great urgency â€" a proud envoy of the world of telegrams.  “People would give up jobs at banks to join our service,” he said.

Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press A staff member dispatching telegrams at the Central Telegraph Office in Mumbai, Maharashtra, on Friday.

The arrival of e-mail and text messaging in the mid-1990s muffled the chatter of typewriters and teleprinters. Telegrams, the fastest way to communicate the 19th century, became expensive and exasperating. Yet men like Mr. Goyal hold on to a sense of its importance.

“We still get wires,” he said. “Fifty to a hundred wires every day.” He adjusted his glasses and opened a telegram sent by a soldier’s wife. “Look at this,” he commanded. The telegram, addressed to a soldier serving at a distant outpost of the Indian Army, read:  “Your father-in-law is serious. Come home with money.”

Mr. Goyal is well aware of how advances in technology have shrunk the customer base for the telegram service, but he is proud of his company’s legacy, the access that a telegram messenger continues to have. “Our messengers have direct access to the prime minister’s office, to the president’s house,” he said. “We have special security passes. Can you imagine a worker from a private phone company entering the president’s house?”

In 1971, India and Pakistan fought their third war as India aided Bengali nationalists in eastern Pakistan to snatch their independence from the Punjabi-dominated western Pakistan and create an independent Bangladesh. Several men from Mr. Goyal’s village in Sonepat worked for the Indian Army. Messengers from the telegraph service arrived on bicycles with missives of survival and death from the frontlines. The villagers gathered around these men in awe and in anticipation.

As a 16-year-old boy, Mr. Goyal was wide eyed as he heard the telegram tales. “I was fascinated when I heard about operators working on typewriters, using Morse code,” he recalled. “It was like having access to a supercomputer today.”

Three years after the war, in 1974, Mr. Goyal left his village for Delhi, dreaming of becoming a wire operator. He learned that he needed to learn stenography first so he enrolled in a diploma course in stenography. On graduating, he joined a small law firm, where he spent his days typing legal petitions and briefs.

A year later, Mr. Goyal passed the transcribing speed test for potential wire operators run by the Department of Posts and Telegraph. After nine months at a government-run training institute in Delhi, Mr. Goyal had learned the art of translating sounds into words.

He worked in an enormous “instrument hall” of a government office, where around 2,000 employees worked in shifts on some 500 machines. “I worked on Morse,” he recalled, his voice brimming with pride.

Mr. Goyal drew a sketch of the telegraph machine, invented by Samuel Morse, which worked on electric signals. He acquired a professorial countenance as he explained how operators decoded the sounds transmitted over the wire.

“A low sound is a dot. A high sound is a dash,” he said. He tapped the table with his index finger, imitating the sound generated by the incoming telegram in Morse code. “One dot and one dash is the code for the letter A,” he said. “One dash and three dots stand for B.”

Until 1979, Mr. Goyal transcribed about 200 messages during every eight-hour shift. “When I transcribed the messages, I forgot the world,” he said.

By the mid-1980s, India’s wire traffic had reached its highest point. Until 1995, the Central Telegraph Office in Delhi, where Mr. Goyal works, received and sent about 20,000 communiqués per day. In 1988, when India test-fired its first surface-to-surface ballistic missile, foreign correspondents lined up to file their stories there. In 1989, when the Indian cricket team managed to fight to a draw against Pakistan in a test series, Mr. Goyal’s office received thousands of wires addressed to the cricketers.

Yet technology was already changing things. Teleprinters had rendered Morse code obsolete. A single print command did the work of a hundred operators. The Department of Posts and Telegram had been split; the telegraph services came under the new Department of Telecommunications.

“We stopped hiring from 1985,” said Shameem Akhtar, the senior general manager of telegraph services. “We predicted the end of the telegram quite early. Now it’s the matter of a few hundred employees. We are trying to adjust them elsewhere.”

Things began to change at a brisk pace after India liberalized its economy after 1990. The Department of Telecommunication had a complete monopoly in the telecom sector. High tariffs ensured stable revenue, but it was a sluggish enterprise. People had to wait between five to 10 years to get a telephone connection.

In 2000, the Indian government formed a corporation, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, as the frontrunner of the telecom industry. It controlled countrywide operations; the Department of Telecommunications was confined to paperwork. Phone call rates were reduced, and private telecom players were allowed into the market. Millions of new cellphone connections were opened to the public.

By 2005, telegraph units spread across India gasped for revenues. Many were simply closed. In Delhi alone, out of 35 wire stations, only four are left. The old guard continued retiring, and nobody replaced them. The telegraph service has fewer than a 1,000 employees left in the country.

Manjunath Kiran/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A customer in the foreground filling out a form for sending a telegram at a telecommunications office in Bangalore, Karnataka, on Wednesday.

“We wanted to save this service, but the ministry didn’t agree,” Mr. Akhtar said. “The annual loss of 135 crores (1.35 billion rupees, or $23 million) is biting us hard. We’d to stop this.”

On Saturday evening, I met two telegraph messengers on the stairs of the Central Telegram Office in central Delhi. Jagdish Chand, 57, had already stopped delivering wires. Last year, when he was cycling toward the National Human Rights Commission in New Delhi to deliver a wire, a car hit him and fractured his leg. His colleague, Bijender Kumar, a 53-year-old messenger with visibly dyed black hair and mustache, continues to deliver telegrams within the eight-kilometer (five-mile) radius of their office.

Mr. Kumar had great difficulty in reconciling to a life without his telegrams to deliver. “All my life I have been out on my bicycle,” he said. “Now I will be put into a building and asked to mop floors and serve tea.”

Inside the telegraph office, Mr. Goyal received three printed messages from the booking desk. He opened e-mail software on his computer terminal. He inserted the area code for the telegraph office closest to the addressee. In another box, he faced the choice of labeling the telegram as urgent or express (normal). It was an express telegram from a father in a low-income South Delhi area to Sheila Dixit, the chief minister of Delhi.

Mr. Goyal transcribed the words: “Sirs, the police picked my son at 4:00 a.m. He was innocent.” I watched as he hit the “send” button. When a message confirming the transmission appeared on the screen, his eyes lit up.

“It’s gone,” he said.

Mehboob Jeelani is a staff writer at The Caravan magazine in New Delhi.