Air India bows in shame

New Delhi: With losses of US$1.5 billion on its head, India's national carrier has simply lost the wherewithal to honor its commitments and has had to run to the government for a $2 billion bailout package to stay afloat - and in the sky.
Government bailouts do not come without strings attached. The clamor of angry employees and conspiracy theories did not deter the carrier's benefactor from setting up stringent payback norms. So now, Air India's performance has been deemed to be of "national concern" and will come under the scrutiny of an external group headed by cabinet secretary K M Chandrashekhar.
The first evaluation meeting is slated for July 25, when the Air India management - executive members of the board of directors and senior officials of the Civil Aviation Ministry - will sit across the table and finalize a blueprint of revival that will include cost-cutting, rationalization of routes, stalling of fleet expansion and manpower pruning. There's talk that Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group of industries, could be roped in to head an international advisory panel that will help pull the ailing public-sector behemoth out of the red.
That really is history coming a full, ironic circle. Air India was originally founded by the late JRD Tata as Tata Airlines in 1932. After independence in 1947, the government of India slowly took over, acquiring a majority stake by 1953. After half a century, the Tata Group made a bid to buy back some stake in partnership with Singapore Airlines in 2000-01, but was thwarted at the last moment. The names of Infosys chief mentor Narayana Murthy and Knowledge Commission chairman Sam Pitroda (once former premier Rajiv Gandhi's favorite technocrat) are also in circulation.
The Aviation Ministry, however, is putting its money on a PowerPoint presentation of the revival plan that will be unveiled at the Chandrashekhar committee meeting - once that rolls out, it says, it won't take long to pull Air India out of the red. Experts in the civil aviation sector say the ministry could be accused of daydreaming and worse for floating hope stories in the midst of an extreme economic downslide that it has little power to arrest.
Nonetheless, the government is gritting its teeth and going down that road. It set up the committee after the flamboyant Civil Aviation minister Praful Patel met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the end of last month, pleading for a bailout package. Now there will be amputative surgery.
22/07/09 Santwana Bhattacharya/Asia Times Online

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: NACIL Jul 2009