Digital age spells doom for India's letter writers

NEW DELHI // For 23 years J C Sharma sat on the steps of the Kashmere Gate post office in Old Delhi, offering his services as a professional letter writer to the illiterate masses that flooded to the city in search of work. Letter writers have been a feature of Indian life for centuries and once took dictation for Mughal courtiers inside the walls of the nearby Red Fort. During the past century, many set up alfresco dictation points outside post offices so a customer's letter could be dispatched straight away.

Last month, India's post office asked Mr Sharma and hundreds of scribes like him across the country to vacate their long-held spots, saying email and widespread mobile-phone usage had rendered their services obsolete. Since India began to liberalise its economy in the 1990s, reliance on the country's notoriously slow state-run postal system has steadily evaporated as private mobile- and fixed-line telephone companies aggressively target India's 1.1 billion people.

Now Mr Sharma, 62, sits barefoot under a banyan tree in a neighbouring courtyard inhabited by a troop of monkeys. He still has between six and 12 clients a day, but no one has asked him to write a personal letter in 10 years, he said. "There used to be four of us working here," he said. "Now I sit here out of choice, but there is no work. Since people have got computers and cell phones, my job has been limited to filling out money orders and sewing up parcels."

In the past, his customers included rickshaw cyclists from the winding alleyways of Old Delhi's walled city and workers from the local spice market. Most wanted to assure their families they were doing well despite working in appalling conditions. "They used to say they were being looked after, they didn't want to send bad news home," said Mr Sharma, who used to charge between two and five rupees (Dh0.1-0.4) a letter.

Mostly, the letters contained instructions on how to spend the hard-earned money that accompanied the letter, but sometimes the message would touch upon more personal issues. Part confidant, part editor, Mr Sharma would let his customers say what was on their minds, but always try to limit the letter to one sheet of paper. His illiterate customers would not know he had produced punchy bullet-point missives from their rambling dictation.

"I used to listen to them, but then write it from my mind, saying what they wanted to say but briefly," Mr Sharma said. Sometimes Mr Sharma's customers would speak only Bengali or Marathi and then Mr Sharma would try his best to write the letter. "I didn't always understand everything they said," he said. Often, he was asked to read out letters his customers received, in many cases also written by a professional letter writer at the other end.

The factors that once made letter writing a viable business still exist today - adult literacy in India is still only 60 per cent and internal migration is huge. An estimated half a million people arrive in Delhi in search of work every year as India's much-lauded economic growth bypasses its 600,000 villages. But mobile phone companies, keen to exploit a market of 1.1bn people, have slashed call tariffs to as low as one cent a minute and introduced cheap handsets. India has a mobile phone subscriber base of more than 280 million, the second largest number of users after China.

As a result, even some of the poorest people in India can afford to have a mobile phone, and with as many as 10,000 handsets being sold every hour, the country has now emerged as the world's fastest growing mobile phone market. "Volumes of personal correspondence have dropped by 50 per cent in the last eight years," said Brig Y P S Mohan, deputy director general of India Post. "Commercial correspondence has risen though."

A significant part of that is mobile phone bills. The post office has also now moved with the times, introducing a hybrid email/letter system to cut down on delivery time. An email is sent to the nearest post office, printed out and a postman delivers it to the recipient's door. The final straw for the letter writers came when India Post discovered some of the writers had been siphoning funds from money orders they were filling out to make up for writing fewer letters, Brig Moghan said.

But the changes that are leading to the demise of Mr Sharma's profession are also providing opportunities for his children. Of his seven daughters, four are still at school and two in their twenties have found good jobs - one with a large multinational firm. "I might only earn 40,000 rupees a year, but they earn much more," he said. Email:hgardner@thenational.ae

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