The Nation: Vice President ;Diplomacy Maharaja Style

Flying Krishan Kant to South Africa in a chartered jet cost Air-India Rs 2 crore.

In foreign lands, what is the emblem of a nation's prestige? Well, anything but the size of the aircraft in which its emissaries arrive. This simple truth is being given the go-by in our country, with the wide-bodied Boeing-747 -- chartered from the Air-India fleet -- becoming a status symbol for foreign travel by India's political masters.

Vice-President Krishan Kant was the latest to be afflicted by the 'Jumbo' mania. To attend the oath-taking ceremony of new South African President Thabo Mbeki on June 16, the 53-member entourage of the vice-president, comprising 12 security personnel and 15 members of the media, flew to Cape Town and Johannesberg in an Air-India Jumbo chartered for five days between June 13-17. The office of the vice-president had brushed aside the polite submission by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), the trip's organiser, that it might be a good idea if all members of the team were put up in the first class and executive class of a commercial flight. Kant's counter argument was that at the time of Nelson Mandela's swearing-in in 1994, the then vice-president K.R. Narayanan had visited Cape Town in an aircraft chartered from India's flagship carrier.

JUMBO BILL

ť AI gave the Boeing 747-200 on charter at Rs 2 lakh a flying hour, but it flew only 19 hrs in 5 days.
ť In those many days, the aircraft would have earned for AI a revenue of Rs 2.4 crore.
ť With losses exceeding Rs 800 crore, AI can't afford such sweetheart deals.
ť VIPs not covered by SPG Act can take commercial flights or IAF Boeing 737 on short hauls.

However, the cost involved in flying the vice-president in a chartered Jumbo jet should affect Air-India more than the government. This is because the state-owned carrier is billing the government at the rate of Rs 2 lakh for each flying hour. In commercial charter deals, airlines generally bill their clients for grounding time too. Even the President and the prime minister when they fly in chartered Air-India jets are billed for both flying and grounding times.

Without such add-on costs, the government expects a bill of Rs 38 lakh for nearly 19 hours of flying. If members of Kant's entourage had taken commercial flights, the cost, estimated by the MEA, would have been about Rs 25 lakh. This is calculated on the basis of an average fare of Rs 50,000 per passenger. However, the costs acquire profligate proportions when seen in the context of the revenue Air-India had to forego by putting up an aircraft on a seemingly one-sided charter arrangement. The revenue loss: the recently re-configured Boeing 747-200 has 380 economy class and 22 executive class seats. The average realisation from each seat for every flying hour is calculated at Rs 2,000. With even a 50 per cent occupancy, the aircraft would have yielded a revenue of Rs 4 lakh in each flying hour. In the five days of its leasing out, the plane would have flown at least 60 hours, bringing in a revenue of Rs 2.4 crore. Thus, the airline has lost at least Rs 2 crore of its normal earnings from this aircraft.

Air-India sources said it did not quite feel the pinch as its flight schedules remained unchanged. "There has been no revenue loss in real terms," says Jitender Bhargava, the airline's director of public relations and national marketing. Besides, the vice-president's entourage being comparatively small -- Prime Minister A.B.Vajpayee flew to the Caribbean for the G-15 Summit in February with a group twice as large -- Air-India did not reconfigure the aircraft, thus saving more than a week's grounding time. To compensate for idling due to reconfiguration on the prime minister's flights, the government pays liberal grounding charges to Air-India. On shorter trips, like the one to Dhaka recently, Vajpayee pruned his entourage to fly by the less expensive Indian Air Force Boeing 737. External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh travelled to Beijing earlier this month by commercial flights.

Chartering of large aircraft cannot be avoided in long journeys by the prime minister because of the statutory obligation to accommodate Special Protection Group personnel with him. But other constitutional functionaries must conquer the lure of flying regally. If not for anything, at least to save the Air-India maharaja, whose privy purse is crushed under accumulated losses of Rs 800 crore.