NEW DELHI — India’s last telegram went out late Sunday, marking the end of a service that millions of Indians had relied on for fast communication for more than 160 years.
Hundreds of people thronged the 75 telegraph offices in the country to send telegrams to friends or family as a keepsake.
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd., which runs India’s telegram service, said declining revenues forced it to end the service, which had become obsolete in an age of e-mail, reliable landlines and ubiquitous cellphones.
India’s telegram service began in 1850, when the first telegram was sent from the eastern city of Kolkata to Diamond Harbor, a southern suburb nearly 25 miles from the city center.
At the service’s 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. From birth and death announcements, to college admissions, job appointments and court summonses, the telegram was the main way tens of millions of Indians received important news.
