On December 16, 2014, New Delhi-based aviation entrepreneur Ajay Singh pushed every button possible to give the company he had co-founded—low-cost airline SpiceJet—a new lease of life. From meeting with bureaucrats at the Ministry of Civil Aviation to addressing the concerns of industry stakeholders like US-based aircraft manufacturer Boeing Co and arranging for Rs 100 crore as working capital, Singh managed to do it all in less than 24 hours. This urgency was warranted: SpiceJet was on the verge of shutting down as it had no money to fly its planes.
In the two days before Singh’s rushed efforts, on December 15 and 16, SpiceJet had halted its flights, which lead to chaos at airports across the country. The media reported extensively on how passengers vented their anger on the airline’s staff, who themselves were a frazzled lot as they hadn’t been paid their salaries for at least a month. “I felt really bad because, after all, it [SpiceJet] was my baby,” recounts Singh.
Although he only had a residual 2.5 percent stake in the company, it was painful for the 49-year-old to see the airline he had launched (along with the UK-based Kansagra family) in May 2005 on the brink of collapse. Singh had stepped down as director of SpiceJet in August 2010, two months after Kalanithi Maran, Chennai-based billionaire and chairman and managing director of Sun Group, became the single largest shareholder in the airline.
26/10/15 Anshul Dhamija/Forbes India
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In the two days before Singh’s rushed efforts, on December 15 and 16, SpiceJet had halted its flights, which lead to chaos at airports across the country. The media reported extensively on how passengers vented their anger on the airline’s staff, who themselves were a frazzled lot as they hadn’t been paid their salaries for at least a month. “I felt really bad because, after all, it [SpiceJet] was my baby,” recounts Singh.
Although he only had a residual 2.5 percent stake in the company, it was painful for the 49-year-old to see the airline he had launched (along with the UK-based Kansagra family) in May 2005 on the brink of collapse. Singh had stepped down as director of SpiceJet in August 2010, two months after Kalanithi Maran, Chennai-based billionaire and chairman and managing director of Sun Group, became the single largest shareholder in the airline.
26/10/15 Anshul Dhamija/Forbes India
