Twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t walk down an indian street without spotting one — a bright yellow sign screaming “STD/PCO.” They stood at bus stands, outside railway stations, in tiny kirana shops, on dusty town corners. At their peak, india had nearly 6.5 lakh STD booths.
Today?
They’re almost extinct.
And that quiet disappearance holds a warning for our AI-driven future.
📞 1. The Era of the STD Booth
Before unlimited calling plans and whatsapp voice notes, long-distance calls were an event. If you wanted to call relatives in another city, you walked to a Subscriber Trunk Dialing (STD) booth.
You stepped inside a cramped glass cubicle.
You waited for the meter to tick.
You watched every second like it was burning money.
For many small shop owners, these booths weren’t just communication hubs — they were livelihoods.
🪙 2. Coins, Meters, and “Hello… Can You Hear Me?”
Some PCOs ran on coins. Others had wallet PLATFORM' target='_blank' title='digital-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW'>digital meters calculating every pulse of your conversation. The booth owner would scribble the amount on a pad and slide the bill toward you.
There was no redial button.
No call recording.
No screenshots.
Just static-filled voices and the anxiety of a rising bill.
For an entire generation, this was normal.
📱 3. Then Came the mobile phone Revolution
And just like that — everything changed.
Affordable handsets. Cheaper call rates. Incoming calls are made free. Telecom wars slashed prices. Owning a personal phone stopped being a luxury and became a necessity.
The impact?
Brutal.
In less than a decade, those 6,50,000 booths started vanishing. One by one. Street by street. No protests. No dramatic farewell.
Just a silent closure.
🏚️ 4. The Disruption Nobody Saw Coming
Imagine telling a PCO owner in 1999 that his entire business model would collapse within ten years.
It would’ve sounded absurd.
Phones in every pocket?
Video calls?
Free global calls over the internet?
Impossible.
Yet here we are.
🤖 5. Now Enter AI
The STD booth wasn’t “bad.” It wasn’t inefficient for its time. It simply got replaced by something faster, cheaper, and more convenient.
That’s how disruption works.
Artificial Intelligence is now doing to white-collar jobs what mobile phones did to PCO booths. Content writing. Coding. customer support.
Data entry. Even in creative fields.
The shift won’t be dramatic. It won’t come with sirens.
It will be gradual. Relentless. Inevitable.
⚠️ 6. The Real Lesson
Disruption doesn’t ask for permission.
It doesn’t care about nostalgia.
It doesn’t slow down because something once worked perfectly.
If 6.5 lakh STD booths could disappear within a generation, what makes us think our current systems are permanent?
💥 Final Thought
Gen Z may never know the thrill of stepping into a yellow booth to make a long-distance call.
But they’re about to witness their own version of that extinction event.
History doesn’t repeat.
It upgrades.
And it doesn’t wait.
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