Race Course Road

India Today, November 23, 1998
Nov 23, 1998

RACE COURSE ROAD
Maharaja in Distress

PM should not use Air-India to subsidise diplomacy.

Prabhu Chawla

All of them love to ride it. Everybody fleeces it. But nobody feeds it. Undoubtedly the current ailments of national carrier Air-India have been brought about by its irresponsible management and recalcitrant trade unions. But aviation experts are now blaming successive prime ministers for its going under. Last week, a retired aviation official even went to the extent of charging the Government with ruining the national carrier by using its scarce resources to subsidise India's foreign policy. In the battle between diplomacy and safeguarding a PSU's bottom line, South Block mandarins seem to have won.

One fallout of this on-going battle is that Air-India has been forced by successive prime ministers to surrender its landing rights to other international carriers in return for supporting India at global forums. In fact, a former prime minister ordered the sacking of a senior civil aviation official simply because the bureaucrat refused to concede additional flights into India to a foreign airline.

Over the years, Air-India has been the most favoured means of globetrotting for the nation's chief executives. Rajiv Gandhi loved to criss-cross the world on an Air-India Jumbo. So have his successors including Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It's a different matter when it comes to returning the favour. The prime ministers play coy. On the one hand, there are restraints on the airline from flying on profitable routes. On the other, permission to augment its fleet is denied. While even corporates have been permitted to go in for external commercial borrowing, all Air-India has got is a firm No. While prime ministers have gone out of their way to offer sovereign guarantees to projects promoted by controversial industrial groups and NRIs, a similar request from Air-India has fallen on deaf bureaucratic ears. Air-India's plea for permission to expand operations has been stymied by foreign office mandarins. Consider these: the Ministry of Civil Aviation has allowed Singapore Airlines to increase its capacity by 60 per cent for flights into and out of India. Air-India's stays where it was five years ago. In the Gulf sector, almost all airlines have been allowed to fly into India at the cost of Air-India. In the Europe sector, the Government has allowed most airlines to pick up more passengers from India. Again, Air-India is the loser. The ministry has simply been bulldozed into surrendering its rights due to the pressure from the Ministry of External Affairs, which invariably is headed by a prime minister. Though no official estimates are available, Air-India officials reckon that the airline loses business worth over Rs 300 crore a year to foreign carriers.

Various prime ministers have been so obsessed with diplomacy that they have swallowed Air-India's humiliation on foreign shores. Four years ago, when plague swept large parts of western India, an Air-India plane -- carrying over 250 passengers was not allowed to land in one of the Gulf countries. The aircraft, low on fuel, flew back to India but not without putting the passengers' lives at peril. Yet three days later, the Ministry of Civil Aviation was forced by the Prime Minister's Office to allow a special flight from the same country to pick up its nationals from Mumbai. If Vajpayee does not intervene to save Air-India, he may well have to float a global tender for an aircraft to take him on his next trip abroad.

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