India sends its last telegram. Stop
India's last telegram went out late on Sunday, marking the end of a service that millions of Indians had relied on for fast communication for more than 160 years.
An Indian telegraph employee processes a telegram on the last day of the 163-year-old service, in Allahabad, India, on Sunday Photo: AP
By Associated Press
3:55PM BST 15 Jul 2013
Hundreds of people thronged the 75 telegraph offices remaining in the country to send their last telegrams to friends or family as a keepsake.
The company cancelled holidays for staff at the offices to handle the rush, Shameem Akhtar, general manager at the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd., which runs India's telegram service, said.
The company says declining revenues forced it to end the service, which had become obsolete in an age of email, reliable landlines and ubiquitous mobile phones. The number of mobile phone users has exploded, with 867 million subscribers as of April.
The last message was booked at the counter of Central Telegraph Office Janpath, sent by Ashwani Mishra to Rahul Gandhi.
The telecommunications ministry said it lost £165 million in the last seven years and that it was time to put an end to the service.
India's telegram service began in 1850, when the first telegram was sent from the eastern city of Calcutta to Diamond Harbour, a southern suburb nearly 25 miles from the city centre.
Over the next few decades, telegraph offices proliferated, wiring the vast subcontinent with a network that became known for its speed and dependability.
At its peak in the mid-1980s, more than 45,000 telegraph offices dotted the country, with tens of thousands of telegraph workers and delivery men dispatching more than 600,000 telegrams a day.
