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Monday, July 8, 2013

The makeover man of India Post in Kashmir

Nasrun Mir
Comfortable leather couches, soft music (mostly Urdu Gazals), neat surroundings and a well-behaved staff-- sounds more like a restaurant than a post office.
In his almost three-year-long tenure as Chief Post Master General of Jammu and Kashmir, John Samuel has reshaped the once dingy structures to well decorated office spaces with an improved work culture.

In many of these reconstructed structures, you may still not find the washrooms, but the makeover is more than acceptable to the customers.
Samuel recalled an instance when a customer visited the Lal Chowk post office and enquired, “There used to be a post office here, did they shift it somewhere else.”
Samuel shared this anecdote with a pride as he spoke in a heavy South Indian accent.  
Hailing from extreme south of Tamil Nadu, Samuel smiles all the time and is quite popular among his staff members and media people with whom he often interacts.
His pro-active approach to work has earned him accolades. And when he is not working, Samuel often ponders over issues like secularism and Indian nationalism.
Perhaps with these notions, his working style cuts the red tapism, normally a common thing with high-ranking administrative officers.  
He is the first Post Master General who functions from Srinagar after the eruption of militancy in Kashmir in 1989.
Samuel said he shares a special bond with Kashmir when he and his wife came for honeymoon to the valley as a newly married couple.
When he was asked to take over the new job in late 2010, he was more than willing. He called his wife who was in London with their two daughters who work and study there. “She was equally excited, like I was,” says Samuel.  
He came to Kashmir at a time when life was limping back to normal in the valley after a tense summer marked by killings, protests, endless curfews and strikes.
In the summer unrest of 2010, over 120 people were killed and hundreds injured in police and paramilitary action against the protesters. The cycle of violence was triggered by the death of a teenager Tufail Matoo who was killed in police action in downtown Srinagar that June.
The valley, as Samuel knew it, was a honeymooners’ paradise in 1980s. However, coming to this ‘dreamland’ in a charged atmosphere as an Indian Administrative Officer was a totally different ball game.
Unlike his predecessors he chose a new path, which has now earned him a reputation of a dreamer and an achiever in a system where things move at a sluggish pace.  
When Samuel’s tenure ends, it may not be the physical makeover of the post offices alone that will be fondly remembered and missed but also his legacy of inducing a pro-active work culture in the Department of Posts.
“When I will leave this space one day, I hope the work ethics which have started to build up will continue to grow,” says Samuel.
“Kashmiris are hardworking people, but the years of turmoil have changed the mindset here. You just need to prick them for the start and after that everything works fine. Probably in south, I don’t need to do that scratching, people come with ideas of their own, but the situation here has been different.”
Samuel was referring to a phenomenon, which has emerged in the valley following the outbreak of militancy in 1989.
According to some accounts, in the last 23 years, Kashmir has witnessed over 8 years of strikes and curfews and it has lost nearly 100000 people in the conflict most of them civilians.
Irfan Hassan, a friend of noted English poet Agha Shahid Ali, who was the first to introduce the concept of Ghazals in English language said the book ‘Country Without Post Office’ by late Ali was based on an idea around the poem which was written on situation inside the GPO Srinagar in early 1990.
According to Hassan, who was very close to Ali in those days, people would go inside the building, which he says and Samuel agrees is one of the ugliest structures on the Residency Road, Srinagar  to search and pick their posts from the heaps of letters and parcels.
GPO was mostly managed by Kashmiri Hindus most of whom migrated to Jammu when the armed rebellion started.
After months of anarchy and breakdown in civil administration, GPO like other government run departments started to function under tight security. The working hours were limited and people had to go through humiliating frisking exercise before mailing a simple post.
The remnants of that past are still visible outside the GPO, which is a four-story slanting concrete structure build in 80s on the banks of River Jhelum.
The structure is in complete disconnect with the Victorian architecture and the lush green surroundings.
One can still see many small courier service stalls outside the building, which until 2012 had bunkers on the main entrance. These stalls came in existence when the post office was shut for months and people used the help of these unreliable services to transfer their important documents to other parts of the world. It was a time when very few people had access to telephones and to make calls to Indian states or abroad, people used to book time slots at State Run Telephone Company at Srinagar locally known as Taar Ghar (Telegram House).
The renovation of the old post offices in Kashmir is part of ‘Project Arrow’ a federal project of Indian state under which all post offices have to be modernized.
“I know the theme of the building is not in taste with the surroundings, but it is a 80s structure and I am trying to do as much of facelift as can be done with the structure,” says Samuel.
He has increased the revenue of the post office in Kashmir division by 37 percent and he expects the trend to grow.
Despite such high growth, postal services in Jammu and Kashmir remain in losses as the state runs the system more as a public mission than a profitable industry.  But from a sluggish unit to a growing enterprise, postal service in Kashmir has changed for good.
Samuel started the evening postal services, unheard in Kashmir before, but now a regular feature at GPO and some other post offices in Kashmir.
GPO also runs seven days a week now. The international parcel service, which earlier used to be open for two days and more dependent on the mood of custom officials who check every parcel dispatched from Srinagar, is now a six-day show.
But Samuel’s biggest achievement is changing the attitude of employees working in his department towards people.
Postal services like many other government run departments in Kashmir carry the notorious reputation of misbehaving with people who visit them for various reasons, but Samuel is working hard to change that. He has held many workshops to sensitize employees on good customer relationship.
“We are trying to impart a culture where employees see people coming inside the post office as customers,” says Samuel.
In his conversations, he talks a lot about change as being critical to the future of Kashmir. Optimistically he views his department as agent for that change.
“I believe we can transform everything here,” he says with a smile.

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