Govt makes changes in aviation ministry bureaucracy

At the fag end of its tenure, the Manmohan Singh government is suddenly making many changes in the civil aviation bureaucracy, including
shifting out of civil aviation secretary M Madhavan Nambiar and joint secretary Arun Mishra, government officials said.
Mr Nambiar is likely to be replaced by textiles secretary Rita Menon, at least two officials said on condition of anonymity.
While Mr Mishra is being sent to Montreal as India’s representative to International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), the government is weighing two options for Mr Nambiar – send him to textile ministry or information technology ministry.
The development marks the scrapping of a proposal to send R K Singh, who was a joint secretary with the civil aviation ministry till recently, to ICAO. Another joint secretary K N Srivastava was recently posted as director general of Archeological Survey of India (ASI).
There is no obvious explanation for the changes that have come in close succession. The situation is similar in the case of Air India where former civil aviation ministry official Raghu Menon was eased out from the top post unusually fast.
According to officials, the decision to shift Mr Menon out was taken on the day he applied for the top post at the proposed Airports Economic Regulatory Authority (AERA).
Top guns in the civil aviation ministry say that they made a mistake in appointing Mr Menon as Air India CMD and he could not cope up with the merger pangs.
According to information available with the ministry, Air India has made losses to the tune of Rs 4,000 crore in 2008-09 alone.
05/05/09 Nirbhay Kumar & G Ganapathy Subramaniam/Economic Times

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Categories: NACIL May 2009