Bird And The Wire

He is right. Orissa's 432 police stations and some 300 police outposts in 30 districts are now equipped with wireless communication systems. But the 794 homing pigeons belonging to the only force of its kind in the country continue to waddle along gamely. Some even fly off with the odd message from an outpost in the boondocks, others participate in an annual pigeon race. Meanwhile, the policemen deliberate whether the five-decade-old service should be scrapped. "it's a difficult choice," says the state's Inspector General of Police (Technical) P.K. Senapati. "The pigeons may have outlived their utility. But they've also served us exceedingly well, and earned us so much fame."

In this age of infobahns and e-mail, persevering with a carrier pigeon service may make Senapati and his men look like Luddites. But many policemen, including the IGP, feel the carrier pigeons could continue to be useful during natural calamities when batteries powering the wireless systems collapse and communications between police stations snap. "it's lacklustre, traditional, but an extremely powerful and reliable means of communication," says Orissa's former DGP Bani Pada Saha. Consider this. Orissa's nifty homing pigeons can fly some 700 to 800 km at a stretch, often maintaining an average speed of 80 to 90 km per hour. Trained from the age of about one month, young homing pigeons or squeakers grow up into handsome grey-and-white birds capable of flying great distances without getting tired. They are kept in pigeon lofts, each of which has a small opening or a trap. In many lofts, the birds enter the trap without difficulty but cannot fly out again.

The pigeons are trained to do manifold services: the static service, for example, is a one-way communication mode where the birds accompany a police party to the interiors and released with messages to return to the loft. The boomerang service, however, offers a more convenient two-way exchange of messages, with the birds flying off from their lofts to a police station or an outpost where a wooden box stacked with grains is kept for them. After having their food, they fly back to their lofts with a return message from the location. "Our pigeons have rendered the force valuable service in ferrying messages during strikes, floods and elections in the past," says Superintendent of Police (signals) B.N. Das. Launched in the remote Koraput district in 1946 with a bunch of a Belgian breed of homing pigeons, the service shot into limelight two years later when a pigeon carried a message from India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. During a tour of the state in April 1948, he needed to send a swift message from Sambhalpur to Cuttack with some directions to the organisers of his public meeting in Orissa's old capital. Sure enough, a homing pigeon of the service carrying the pithy message-'the arrangement for the public meeting should not be such as to separate the speaker too much from the audience'- flew some 250 km to reach Cuttack in just under five-and-a-half hours. Nehru was mighty impressed.

Since then, these wonderful birds have shown off their skills at postal exhibitions, participated in races, found their pride of place on first-day cover stamps honouring the 'Kabutar Dak Seva' and faced the cameras for documentaries and serials. "They are obedient birds who never fuss or snap," says Mallick.

The small birds are also extremely cheap to maintain. Sixty grams of a mix of grain every day is sufficient feed for a homing pigeon. Sea shells and rock salts are also given to help their digestion. No wonder a third of the service's Rs 1.25 lakh annual budget is actually eaten up by the salaries of 40 police personnel, including 34 constables, who train and look after the birds in 29 lofts across the state. As Senapati says: "Clipping the wings of the service because of financial reasons doesn't really make much sense, because the amount involved is not much at all."

But the glory days of the service are clearly over. From a high of 9,000 messages carried by the pigeons in little metal cylinders attached to their legs with rubber bands in 1990, the birds carried only 2,000 messages last year. This year, the numbers would decline further. The flock today is also poorer by some 200 birds from a high of 1,034 homing pigeons seven years ago. Breeding these pigeons, who live between 15 and 20 years, is also not being encouraged.

Clearly, Orissa's winged messengers are on their last flight. Their superior stock made them bigger in size with glittering eyes and an unerring natural instinct to return home. "Machines can fail you, but birds never will," says Senapati, in his spacious Cuttack office. But just two km away, the 120-ft police wireless tower looming over the quaint headquarters of the carrier pigeon service is symbolic of how the birds have become remains of another day.