Geoff@CSL.SRI.COM (the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow) (08/26/86)
Telephone Torture Sends Politican on Rampage, Operators on Strike
By VICTORIA GRAHAM
NEW DELHI, India (AP) - This is a true story about modern India. The
villain is the telephone, taken for granted in much of the world, but
in India regarded as an instrument of torture.
The leading man is a former Cabinet minister, once a powerful
politician who defied Sikh death threats, but a man humbled by the
telephone and a call that wouldn't come through, even at gunpoint.
Twenty-six hours and 20 minutes after booking, he got the call.
The leading lady is played by hundreds of low-paid, sari-clad,
shrieking operators, described by the politician as ''fat, lazy
gossips, drinking tea in a lousy telephone system, the worst in the
world.''
Comparing themselves to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, the
operators went on a three-day wildcat strike, smashing switchboards,
crippling service and demanding that the politician, former Home
Minister Prakash Chand Sethi, be jailed or held as insane.
Some call the telephone melodrama farce, or soap opera, or morality
play. The drama has not been played out, but this is how it began:
Last Friday at 12:50 a.m., Sethi, a member of Parliament, decided
enough was enough. He had waited four hours and 20 minutes and made
five pleas to an operator to get a top priority ''lightning'' call to
Bombay from his home.
He warned the operator he was on his way to her office and set off
with his son-in-law and three armed bodyguards, assigned to him
because his life had been threatened. He was in charge of domestic
security when the army attacked the Sikhs' Golden Temple in June
1984.
Sethi took his Czechoslovak-made, licensed revolver, explaining
later that security rules ''require me to hold onto my gun.''
Brushing past guards at the downtown exchange, the capital's
telephone nerve center, the midnight raiders stormed to the ninth
floor and demanded to see the offending operator, Miss Kiran.
''I am a public man with a grouse,'' he later said. ''This place
should be thrown open to citizens so they can see what a mess the
telephone system is.''
Then accounts differ.
Miss Kiran said she peeked from the ladies room and saw a man in a
white pajama suit - drunk, staggering, swaggering and abusive -
advancing with three guards toward the switchboard. She said she came
out and he grabbed her arms, waving his revolver and blowing cigar
smoke into her face.
''Do you know who I am? Do you want to live in this world?''
witnesses quoted Sethi as saying. ''I can buy girls like you for five
rupees (40 cents).''
They said a male shop steward interceded, but the 65-year-old Sethi
roughed him up and tore his clothes, then collapsed on the floor for
30 minutes. Miss Kiran bolted the exit to keep him there until police
arrived.
''I'll jump from the ninth floor and die but I will have justice,''
she told reporters.
Police charged Sethi with trespassing, disturbing the peace, using
filthy and abusive language and assaulting a public servant on duty.
He was not arrested.
Sethi says he was petrified when operators surrounded him and
wouldn't let him go. Then, he says, the shop steward knocked him out.
He got home at 3:30 a.m. Saturday and says a doctor certified he was
not drunk.
But about 4,000 operators and staff disputed Sethi's account. By
dawn they launched a strike, demanding his arrest.
Domestic and overseas bookings weere paralyzed. Some emergency
police numbers were dead. Other services were crippled. Women sat
atop switchboards, twisted their headsets apart and shouted, ''Death
to Sethi!''
Still, Sethi's fury struck a responsive chord.
India's telephone system is notorious for inefficiency, rude
operators, equipment that smacks of bullock-cart technology, and
thousands of dead phones. Frustrated subscribers have been known to
smash telephones.
''The level of inefficiency, callousness and simple insolence in the
telephone exchanges would drive anyone mad,'' the Hindustan Times
editorialized Monday.
But the strike was an embarrassment. Over the weekend, police and
soldiers got involved. Signal corps engineers worked without pause to
repair equipment.
Outside, husbands and boyfriends waited for their women.
The women dropped notes complaining they were locked on the top
floor, unable to eat or go to the bathroom, because they refused to
work.
After 2 1/2 days, on Sunday night the government announced the strike
was over and Sethi had apologized, but many strikers denied it and so
did Sethi.
Sethi claimed the goverment fabricated a letter over his signature.
The protest subsided Monday, but the telephone saga went on.
Sethi, waving a cordless Japanese telephone, said, ''In India, you
just cannot get a call through.''
Ring of Telephone in India More Sign of Frustration than Conversation
By G.G. LaBELLE
NEW DELHI, India (AP) - The ring of a telephone in India is more
often a signal for frustration than conversation.
Faulty equipment creates a plague of wrong numbers. Frequent
cross-connections mean the person answering may find two strangers
already talking. Often, too, there is dead silence or a tiny voice
straining to be heard.
That may be why one leading Indian newspaper offered backhanded
sympathy Monday for the gun-toting politician who set off a three-day
phone strike in New Delhi by insulting operators at a telephone
office.
Former Cabinet Minister Prakash Chand Sethi barged into the exchange
Thursday when he could not get a long-distance phone call through
from home.
His actions set off the strike, but at its end, the Hindustan Times
wrote: ''Let not in the midst of Sethi's acts of indiscretion a
crucial point be missed - the level of inefficiency, callousness and
simple insolence in the telephone exchanges in India would drive
anyone mad.''
Even the government admitted in a statement last year that India
''perhaps has the lowest level of telephone service in the world.''
To begin with, there are only 3 million phones for the 780 million
populace. That's one for every 260 people, compared to one for every
two people in England and France and one for every 1.3 people in the
United States.
As of January, 997,000 Indians were on the waiting list to get a
telephone.
A study by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry says the country needs 28 million phones to function
properly with its present population.
Then there is the matter that telephones break down so often that
the visit of the repairman is a favorite subject of cartoonists. One
cartoon features a frustrated customer saying to the lineman, ''Sorry
to bother you perpetually. Why don't you just stay with us?''
During last year's monsoon season, 30,000 phones went out in New
Delhi at once when the annual heavy rains hit. The same thing happens
regularly in Bombay and Calcutta, much soggier cities.
In Calcutta in 1982, one angry citizen put up a tombstone for his
dead telephone. It remains today, bearing the poem:
''Oh, child of communication,
''You were born to bridge the gap.
''But corruption has caused a mishap,
''Inefficiency and procrastination
''Caused the telephone lines to go snap.''
Even when India's phones are working, they are not up to those in
most places in the world.
Sometimes there is a long wait for a dial tone. It often takes
several dials to get a call through. There are so many wrong numbers
that many people begin conversations by asking if they've reached the
number they dialed.
For long distance, the few direct-dial facilities are so overloaded
that most times it's necessary to book a call through an operator.
In recognition that the system is less than perfect, there is one
number for bookings and another for complaining that the call did not
go through.
One woman wrote a newspaper article chronicling how she spent an
entire day dialing the two numbers trying to make one call.
She finally gave up, but was awakened at 11:55 p.m. when an operator
called asking whether she would she like to rebook the call for the
next day.
Complaints about phones are not only sent to the telephone company
but debated in newspaper editorials and on the floor of Parliament.
It's not that the government isn't trying. At India's independence
in 1947, there were 82,000 phones, about one for every 4,150 Indians.
But India's population has more than doubled since then and is
expected to pass the 1 billion mark around the year 2000.
Indian writer Ranjit Lal theorized in a recent article in the Times
of India that the country's phone troubles resulted because
telephones, like India's Hindus, believe in reincarnation.
''Most telephones in India suffer from a collective and impelling
death wish,'' he concluded. ''This is because they wish to be
reincarnated as something better as quickly as possible.''
He added: ''It is also likely that if you have sinned grievously in
this life, you may be born an Indian telephone in your next life.''