Hasssan Cheruppa
JEDDAH — Consul General B.S. Mubarak is leaving the Kingdom today after accomplishing a great mission as one of the most popular and dynamic Indian consuls general who have served in Jeddah. He will fly on board the Air India flight Wednesday evening to New Delhi where he will join the headquarters of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) as director of south, which is handling the affairs of ASEAN countries plus Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific Islands. Former Deputy Consul General and Haj Consul Mohammed Noor Rahman Sheikh will succeed Mubarak as the new consul general. Sheikh is now serving as first secretary at India’s Permanent Mission at the United Nations in New York.
A 24/7 Indian Workers’ Resource Center (IWRS), which was launched on Tuesday, is one among the major contributions of Mubarak to the Indian community. Mubarak, who had served as deputy consul general and Haj consul in Jeddah for four years in his earlier stint here, took charge as consul general in May, 2014. He is bidding farewell after leaving behind an impressive legacy of outstanding services to a million-strong Indian expatriate community living in the western region of Saudi Arabia.
Speaking to Saudi Gazette, he said: “I am leaving Jeddah with extreme satisfaction and self-realization of doing hard work in serving the community, especially the Haj pilgrims. Being a Muslim, I feel it’s a great reward and honor, and an extremely gratifying experience to head the Indian Haj mission, and hence I am a bit not happy to leave this place but at the same time I was looking forward to get the opportunity to work at the ministry headquarters in New Delhi,” he said.
“A diplomat should have an equal balancing of career with a right mix of working outside the country and inside the country,” he said. “Initially, at the start of my diplomatic career, I worked one and half years in New Delhi and that time the experience of one year was equivalent to almost 10 years as far as the amount of enormous experience one gains is concerned,” he said.
Mubarak said that he takes back a lot of experience as far as leadership is concerned, especially in the realms of Haj, community welfare, commerce, and interaction with the community. “Always, my philosophy is team work while considering the fact that any organization cannot be dependent solely on one individual or the other. Being part of a wonderful team, together with Rahman Sheikh, I brought a lot of internal structural changes in various branches of the consulate services as well as in Haj division,” he said.
According to Mubarak, streamlining and giving new impetus to the vital community welfare sector is the major achievement in his two-year stint. “We streamlined and restructured the community welfare division by bringing in a number of young and energetic people with the full involvement of community welfare volunteers, especially those from the Coordination Committees of Welfare Associations (CCWA) outside Jeddah. We gave training to all staff in the community welfare section as well as to the volunteers,” he said while appreciating the role of Consul (Consular) Anand Kumar in this regard. “There were lots of death compensation cases and we tackled this on war-footing with closely following and dispensing with all the pending cases within a span of six month.”
Mubarak, who is eager to come to Jeddah again and again as a pilgrim, says that the opportunity to serve pilgrims is the greatest blessing in his life. “At the helm of the Indian Haj mission, I tried my best to solve many problems facing the pilgrims and made further qualitative leap in the services and facilities for the pilgrims. During the Haj of 2015, nearly 96 percent of pilgrims in Green Category in Makkah got accommodation in best buildings with attached bathrooms. We redesigned the entire criteria in selection of buildings and infused a lot of technology and social media in further improving the services and adding more comfort to Hajis.” In his capacity as vice patron of Saudi-Indian Business Network (SIBN), Mubarak made great efforts to take SIBN to a great level. He was instrumental in giving a new impetus to Saudi-India business relations after identifying the immense potential of business opportunities in the Kingdom. “Successful efforts to find out a big plot prior to constructing new consulate general premises, and steps to start a fourth campus for International Indian School-Jeddah include among my unaccomplished tasks,” he added.
