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| The telephone, sorry, telecommunications, department is laying optic-fibre cables underground, making old phone lines that ran on poles along roads and pathways obsolete and useless. |
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| Knowing that the overhead phone wire is no longer in use, people are quietly snipping off lengths of it, to take home to put up a line for hanging their washing, or just keep it for some future use. |
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| In courtyards and balconies lines of it have come up to dry clothes and air bedding, that gets mouldy and smelly in dark, unventilated hill homes. Mites and other micro-organisms fester in dark, damp places and cause itch or rash on skin upon coming in contact with it. |
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| Talking of smelly bedding, the new Uttaranchal Governor, Mr. Sudarshan Agrawal, ordered the police to seize a set of it at Rambara government guesthouse where he had to stay on his return from Kedarnath temple the other day. |
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| How dare they offer musty bedding to the governor? He however knew that the guesthouse had just opened after remaining closed for six wintry months during which the Kedarnath pilgrimage stops because of cold and snow. The bedding perhaps needed to be placed in the sun for a couple of days at least. |
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| Everyone, rich or poor, does need a clothesline. (One wonders if the government guesthouse bedding has now been placed in the sun to dry on a line made of the abandoned telephone wire?) |
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| Not only the overhead hard wire but also the flexible one that connects junction boxes with individual telephone instruments in homes is also available, for whatever use one can put it to. So are the tall, tapering, hollow zinc-iron poles on which the old wire ran. And all this is for free! |
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| People break and take away the wire quietly, trying not to get noticed and caught in the act. They know it is government property, and helping oneself to it amounts to theft. But it is abandoned and there is nobody around even to shout at those helping themselves to it. |
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| Some come at night to try to take even the poles. But most are placed in the ground with their base cemented. So it is not easy to dig them out quietly and in a hurry. Determined people however try to bend and break them. |
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| But the alloy poles which do bend, do not break. That is why one sees so many of them bent and lying horizontally on the ground, like fallen warriors. |
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| One wonders what use people wanting to take them can put them to? Spread over several thousand square kilometres, these old telephone lines and poles must still be of considerable value, even as scrap. |
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| Why would the government not think of selling all that material as such, to recover part, perhaps a very small part, of the vast cost that laying of those lines would have involved during the past century? If this scrap could not be put to better use, we in these hills would certainly have bought the metal wire for our clothesline. |
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| But since it is abandoned government property, it is considered to belong to no one. The government has decided not to arrange its sale, which would take efforts to organise and could turn out to be a headache. |
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| So why bother? A charitable way of looking at it would be to think that since it belongs to the people, let them help themselves to it!? |
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