As newspaper headlines this morning scream about corporate governance issues at IT bellweather Infosys, perhaps the government needs to look out for its own airline, Air India. For several months now, Air India’s board has been taking decisions without any independent directors - apart from functional directors, the two government nominees seem to be the only voices of sanity in the board meetings since last summer, when the five independent directors retired. Whether there are corporate governance issues at Air India a la Infosys is something the experts need to ponder over. We are bringing up this point to show how Air India’s owner, the government, is going around in circles, clueless about which leaking tap to fix in its rush to keep the airline under its fold.
Someone needs to tell the Modi government to stop protecting Air India from possible privatisation, stop preening about its maiden operating profit (which was a first after the merger of the two erstwhile airlines in 2015-16), control the urge to pump in yet more of taxpayers’ money into this black hole – and address the basic issues plaguing the national carrier first.
If after months of back-and-forth the government is still undecided about who to nominate as independent directors on the airline’s board, is it all serious about making Air India self-sustainable? Perhaps the attempt should be to shutter the airline now, when it has shown at least one year of operational profit, instead of waiting endlessly for the bleeding behemoth to shudder and pass out.
10/02/17 Sindhu Bhattacharya/First Post
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Someone needs to tell the Modi government to stop protecting Air India from possible privatisation, stop preening about its maiden operating profit (which was a first after the merger of the two erstwhile airlines in 2015-16), control the urge to pump in yet more of taxpayers’ money into this black hole – and address the basic issues plaguing the national carrier first.
If after months of back-and-forth the government is still undecided about who to nominate as independent directors on the airline’s board, is it all serious about making Air India self-sustainable? Perhaps the attempt should be to shutter the airline now, when it has shown at least one year of operational profit, instead of waiting endlessly for the bleeding behemoth to shudder and pass out.
10/02/17 Sindhu Bhattacharya/First Post
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