Bhubaneswar, July 14: The telegram has been on oxygen for quite sometime now. But the fact that it has officially ceased to exist from today has left thousands of postal workers, past and present, feeling an irreparable sense of loss.

Sixty-eight-year-old Bijay Ketan Barik, who retired from the department’s service a decade ago, sounded disappointed. “Telegrams were a great way of connecting with people. I find it hard to believe that they are going to stop the service from tomorrow,” said the veteran whose hearing problem, according to his doctors, was the result of prolonged exposure to the cacophonous Morse code and teleprinter machine.

Barik, who served the department for four decades, agreed that with the advent of modern technology the demand for telegrams was declining over the years. But he still felt it served a useful purpose. “Thousands of people in towns and villages across the state used to wait for those terse messages relayed to our offices through wires,” he recalled.

The old man turned nostalgic. “In 1967, I started as a messenger whose job was to deliver telegrams to people’s doorsteps. People used to single me out as the harbinger of bad news. But the truth is that I used to convey more of good than bad tidings. It was a tough job and I used to deliver the messages even at odd hours,” said Barik.

After nearly 20 years of service, he was promoted to the rank of telegraph technical operator with the job of receiving and dispatching telegrams. “During the Bangladesh liberation war, I had a hectic schedule. Messages were pouring in. Many young men from Kendrapara were in the army fighting that war,” he recalled. Then there were plumbers from the district working in cities such as Calcutta who used to send telegrams regularly. The flow of messages increased suddenly when refugees from Bangladesh began crowding Indian cities.

“There was a steady flow of messages coming in and going out. I had a hectic schedule dealing with them,” said Barik.

The veteran recalled how the service had conked out for over 48 hours during the 1999 super-cyclone, which badly damaged communication lines. “We were on tenterhooks. But once the lines were restored, we worked round-the-clock delivering messages to the worried relatives of the victims,” he said lamenting the government’s decision to wind up the service.

His feelings are shared by many others familiar with the service and its history.

The use of telegrams in India was pioneered by William O’Shaughnessy, a surgeon and inventor who used a code other than the popular Morse code to send his first message by transmitting electric signals over long distances. The first telegraphic message in India was successfully transmitted over a distance of 13 and a half miles between Calcutta and Diamond Harbour in 1850.

Lord Dalhousie, the governor of India, was quick to realise the potential of telegrams as a tool of communication and authorised O’Shaughnessy to build a 27-mile line near Calcutta. By 1856, the network stretched 4,000 miles across the British Raj, connecting cities such as Calcutta, Agra, Bombay, Peshawar, and Madras.

The service stood the British in good stead during the rebellion of 1857, which they were able to suppress mainly because of the quick movement of information through telegraphic messages.