Flying the protest flag

New Delhi: No one in the National Aviation Company Ltd (Nacil), which runs Air India, would have ever thought that a protest by executive pilots would bring the state-owned airline to a halt. In that sense, Captain V K Bhalla, the representative of the executive pilots who went on a five-day strike, can claim a victory.
Fifty-year-old Bhalla is something of a controversial personality, even according to the colleagues whose cause he argued all week. For a start, his credentials to represent the protesting executive pilots, who account for about a quarter of the airline’s 319 executive pilots, are unclear.
The executive pilots have no union — they are barred from forming one once they reach the managerial cadres — but Bhalla claims he was elected, a fact his colleagues confirm. All the same, he is not uniformly popular. Some senior colleagues suggest he is not a good pilot (a worrying thought since he is now an instructor) and others use the term “loud mouth” and “lacking vision” to describe him.
Asked about these descriptions, Bhalla, who did his initial flying training from Patiala and later went to France for Airbus training, said they could only have come from a rival faction. “If I am not a good pilot how could I reach this level?” he points out.
Whatever his skills as a pilot, it is Bhalla’s experience as a successful negotiator against the management that convinced the protestors.
Bhalla’s first stand-off with the management was in 1995, when he was president of Indian Commercial Pilots Association, which is the largest pilots’ union in the current merged airline and was then the only pilots’ union in Indian Airlines. Bhalla led a three-day strike to demand that Indian Airlines pilots’ salaries be put on a par with private airlines.
The solution was found in productivity-linked incentives (PLI) to bridge the gap with the private sector airlines. Although this system appeased the pilots at the time, it skewed salary structures in the sense that PLI came to represent almost five times a pilot’s base salary and most of it was not linked to productivity benchmarks.
02/10/09 Mihir Mishra/Business Standard