Govt will appoint a professional to head merged Air India

New Delhi: The civil aviation ministry will soon look for Air India’s first professional chairman and managing director (CMD).
The ministry had recently announced V. Thulasidas as the new CMD and Vishwapati Trivedi as joint MD to spearhead the entity that will emerge when Air India and its domestic counterpart, Indian, merge.
The new head will be chosen from the aviation industry and will replace Thulasidas, who completes his extended term this fiscal year.
However, there would not be any other changes in the board of directors of the newly announced National Aviation Company Ltd, under which the Air India brand will be flying, the official said.
Aviation experts have been demanding that the state-carrier, given the scale of its operations, be run by a professional manager rather than an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, who typically heads public sector companies in the country. Both Thulasidas and Trivedi are career bureaucrats from the IAS.
With 111 aircraft on orders over the next four years, the airline is set to be the fourth largest carrier in Asia and will need a core professional team to streamline the merger process, said Kapil Kaul, a Delhi-based analyst with Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation.
14/06/07 Tarun Shukla/Livemint

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Categories: Air India Jun 2007, Indian Jun 2007