Columns: Fifth Column

Columns

India Today, March 1, 1999
March 1, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
Clip their Wings

The Government must tell striking ATCs who the boss is.

By Tavleen Singh

In the week that the bus to Pakistan brings a much-needed good mark for the Government it may seem churlish to draw attention to one of its more negative qualities: its weakness. But, if you had suffered at the hands of our air traffic controllers as much as I lately have, you may not think so. Like thousands of other people who have attempted to travel by air in India in the past couple of weeks, I have sat for hours in aeroplanes that have waited in a queue to take off and been unable to do so because our air traffic controllers (ATCs) have been "going slow". The longest wait was three hours at Delhi airport (in the aeroplane, engines running) and the longest flight was 12 hours from Mumbai to Hyderabad.

Let me tell you just the Hyderabad story to illustrate the sort of harassment air travelers have faced at the hands of a group of people who should have been sacked on the first day of their "go slow". I was scheduled to leave Mumbai on a Jet Airways flight that should have left at 5.40 p.m. I was told that it would be leaving an hour late but when I got to the airport I discovered that it would now be two hours before it left.

Two hours later we boarded the aircraft only to discover that we would now be waiting another three hours before we could take off. After sitting in the aircraft for three hours we were told that the flight would have to be cancelled altogether and we would be able to get to Hyderabad only the following morning. My fellow travellers accepted their lot gracefully and trooped quietly off to the hotel that Jet Airways had kindly provided them with. But I had an interview scheduled with the chief minister at 6.15 the following morning and had to find some way of getting to Hyderabad before dawn. So I rushed to the international airport to get myself on an Air-India flight which was also delayed by two hours on the tarmac. By the time I got to Hyderabad it was 5 a.m.

While I was interviewing Chandrababu Naidu, our only modern chief minister, I could not help thinking what he would have done had he been faced with a similar strike by the ATCs. I think he would have sacked every ATC on the first day of the strike and called in the air force to man the control towers. He would have then sacked his civil aviation minister. I can say this with confidence because during the day I spent with him I watched him deal with officials in a district collectorate and government doctors in charge of a hospital. He berated them publicly for their incompetence and made it absolutely clear that since they had failed to perform they would face action. But then Chandrababu Naidu is a strong chief minister whereas what we have in Delhi is the weakest Government possible.

Our ATCs have been taking advantage of this weakness for several months. This is not the first time they have held the country to ransom. They have done it before and they will, undoubtedly, do it again in the peak tourist season because nobody has the courage to do what President Ronald Reagan did when he faced a similar problem. The US has several thousand more airports than we do but Reagan had no hesitation in sacking his ATCs after giving them till midnight to end their strike. That is the only way to deal with such a situation.

It is irrelevant whether our ATCs have valid reasons for being on strike. They must be made to realise that causing thousands of crores of rupees of losses to the country is not the way to make their point. As it is we have domestic air services that are bad by international standards. There are not enough flights to most places, those that exist are often late, and the end result is that many foreign tourists avoid coming back to India once they discover how hard it is to get anywhere.

The point, though, is that it is more than time that the prime minister woke up to how bad it makes his Government look when a small group of people is able to make demands with a gun to its head.

During my travels this past week, I have also had occasion to spend some time in Uttar Pradesh, crucial as we all know to who is going to win the next general election. Everyone I spoke to said that the next time round the Congress would easily be able to get more than 30 seats (from the paltry three or four it currently has) in the state. When I asked them why they said it was because the BJP-led Government in Delhi had proved that only the Congress party knew how to govern the country.

They said that all the BJP-led Government seemed to be concerned with was religion when what the country needed was governance. Ironically, it is also from the BJP Government in Uttar Pradesh that we have seen how to deal with workers in essential services who use blackmail to get what they want. The Uttar Pradesh power minister refused to give in to the state electricity board workers who tried to go on strike and the result was that the strike was called off within hours.

State electricity board workers are, poor things, among the country's lowest paid people and may, therefore, have had some genuine demands. ATCs, on the other hand, are among the highest paid people in India and are demanding salaries that would give them approximately Rs 40,000 more per month. It is an outrage that they have been allowed to get away with their behaviour and equally outrageous that the civil aviation minister has not already been sacked.

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