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Jyotiraditya Scindia: Man Who Revived The Indian Postal System
By ugesh sarkar, Section More About The Scindia's
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 </center>After assuming office at Udyog Bhawan, which houses the commerce and industry ministry, Jyotiraditya Scindia decided to shift his workstation from a dark ground floor room to a first floor suite, which was renovated to enlarge the windows and let in natural sunlight. The idea was not to increase warmth inside or reduce electricity bill for the government, but to bring in fresh ideas to his work place as he forays into making his ministry an innovation centre.When the young MP from Guna was made a junior minister for communication and IT during the final year of the last UPA regime, he was in a hurry to make a mark in the government. Those were uncertain days for all Congressmen as political pundits had predicted an early fall of the UPA government, thanks to the Indo-US nuke deal. His own ministry was preoccupied with issues such as 3G and number portability. Wasting no time, Scindia chose to devote his time and energy for rebranding India's postal department which remained a laggard for decades post Independence. "I was passionate about it. Have you been to Lodhi Market post office sometime recently? The very look and feel of the place has changed altogether," he says with a sense of pride and satisfaction. Now in Udyog Bhawan, Scindia wants to bring in the same rigour and passion to transform the way exports take place and also to rebrand Indian tea for global customers. There are plans even to open branded tea outlets around the world. And Scindia is adopting the same formula which he had deployed while rebranding India Post and gained instant dividends. SK Sinha, chief general manager of Postal Life Insurance, narrates how Scindia forced senior postal officers to personally sit at the post offices to improve services. "The modernisation of post offices was taken up on a mission mode. Unlike many other government programmes, there were strict deadlines and Scindia held regular meetings with senior officials to ensure it's on track. The concept of `change leaders' was introduced in a government set-up. The faster delivery was made a key component of the mission, and tolerance level was reduced to less than 5%," he says. If rebranding of India Post is considered a benchmark, the bigger challenge that Scindia faces today is whether he would be able to match hiswork in the commerce ministry with that of his earlier tenure. Senior officials in the ministry, who did not wish to be named, say that Scindia's major handicap is lack of freedom within the ministry. As a junior minister, his hands are tied and he could do very little on his own to make a difference to Indian exporters or tea industry. However, Scindia, who along with other ministers of state held a meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on work allocation, would not like to talk on this subject. Source: Economic Times By Shantanu Nandan Sharma Jyotiraditya Scindia: Man who revived the Indian Postal system Click On "Full Story" To Read Full Article & Interview With ET
But the Congressmen who had also worked with his father and former Union minister Madhavrao Scindia, strongly believe that Scindia Junior had imbibed the quality of troubleshooting from his father. Pratap Bhanu Sharma, a two-term MP from Vidisha in 1980s, says that he finds everything similar between the father and the son. "I have been associated with the Scindias for the last 40 years. Like his father, Jyotiradityji too does not keep any file pending and strongly believes in quick disposal of work. And he is innovating big time in government set up too.
Thanks to what he has done to the postal department, the money order from Vidisha to New Delhi now takes just one day to reach. And you feel happy when you get an SMS saying your money has been delivered," he says. Former Railway Board member Anup Singh, who met Madhavrao Scindia from close quarters in the railway ministry in late 1980s, endorses the view. "I saw Jyotiraditya grow up before my eyes, and he is going to be a change agent like his father. I still remember clearly how Madhavrao Scindia as the railway minister, first studied the complex Indian Railways for several months before engineering major changes in the department. He was the first minister to introduce the human face to the Railways. The mandate for all railway officials then was to initiate a change in the mind-set that Railways was not just a freight carrier, but essentially a pro-passenger mode of transport," Singh says. In fact, Madhavrao Scindia's impeccable innings both as railway minister and then as minister of civil aviation will always pressurise the younger Scindia to perform, as everyone in the government and outside will draw parallels between the father and the son. Jyotiraditya will have to perfrom over the benchmarks set by the family. If the branding exercise of the Indian postal service has given Scindia Junior a headstart, his real performance will be weighed only now. "I don't like to set a difficult target and under-achieve it. For me, the passion now is to make Indian tea a global brand," he says. No wonder, brand Scindia could depend a lot on the saga of Indian tea's global journey. ET spoke to minister of state for commerce and industry minister about his plans to establish Indian tea as a global brand.
You worked hard on re-branding India's postal system. Do you consider it a success? We adopted the approach of business process reengineering (an approach aiming at improvements of business process that exists within organisations). I involved the people who understand brands very well, like Piyush Pandey of Ogilvy & Mather's. The results have started showing in now. You enter any one of the refurbished post offices, you see a change in every aspect.
What's your big new idea here in the ministry now? We need to conquer markets like Western countries, CIS countries. And for that we will go for major brand building exercise including holding of international exhibition, meetings etc. The campaign will not be about having a mere logo and holding of a few seminars. It will be a sustained campaign, and we may even go for having outlets of our own in various countries which will sell Indian tea.
Any other initiative that is aimed at changing the system as a whole? We have set up a core group to deliberate on how the entire value chain from ex-factory to the final port works, and how we can evolve a mechanism through which the entire transaction becomes smooth and cost-effective. Saving time is equally important. We are now studying the global best practices in this regard, and some of those practices will be applied in the Indian context.
How are you responding to a situation in which global expectations from India are increasing by the day?
There has been a complaint that most of the junior ministers don't get adequate work, forget implementing any fresh ideas. Is it true in your case too?
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