No coherent revival plan for Air India

Like most government initiatives, the Rescue Air India operation is full of good intentions, but lacks the radical punch necessary to put the national carrier on a planned flight path.
In theory, infusion of additional equity and induction of independent directors should help the airline find its way back to the black. But the truth is, setting the problem right will not be simple. First, the government has taken too long to clear the Rs 800 crore equity infusion for Air India (AI), and neither the airline nor the bureaucracy is clear when and how another Rs 1,200 crore would be provided to the Maharajah.
As discussions dragged on, the national carrier has run up much more losses than what the government has provided for and is likely to provide in the near future. As of now, there is no indication that the royal mess is getting cleaned up. Without a clear game plan for revival, Air India is simply drifting like Alice in wonderland.
The most important reason for lack of direction is the classic case of too many cooks. There is a Group of Ministers (GoM) headed by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, an inter-ministerial group that is essentially a committee of secretaries, the civil aviation ministry that traditionally ran the airline, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Secretariat and a bunch of consultants.
While the GoM is the ultimate authority, people in the company and the civil aviation ministry talk about the personal interest taken by prime minister Manmohan Singh in revival of AI, and how this got PMO pulled into action.
09/03/10 G Ganapathy Subramaniam/Economic Times

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Categories: NACIL Mar 2010