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The Civil Aviation Minister, Mr Praful Patel, is frantically casting about to put Air India (AI) back on the rails. It is not as if he has been confronted with a sudden crisis. There was no dearth of signals for as long as one can look back that India’s national airline was heading for trouble. All its vital signs — productivity of technical personnel (40 per cent of international norms), staff strength ratio per aircraft (330 as against the prevalent average o f 190), number of working hours per week of cabin crew (50-55 hours compared with 70 in other airlines), to cite just a few — were indicative of chronic sickness.

As regards its bloated establishment leading to a burgeoning wage bill (Rs 3,600 crore a year) causing a mammoth loss of Rs 5,000 crore in 2008-09, here is a comparative picture culled from published sources: AI operating 147 aircraft employs 46,500 (including 15,000 on contract), whereas British Airways with a fleet of 249 aircraft employs 55,296, Air France with 203 aircraft manages with 47,343, Singapore Airlines with 75 aircraft has only12,966 and Cathay Pacific with 60 aircraft gets along with 15,178. (In fairness to AI, it must be added that some of them have outsourced part of their operations.)

The pilots and other categories of employees enjoy allowances and perks under all manner of pretexts pushing up the outgo and the losses further. No wonder, AI contributes 10 per cent of global airline losses with just 0.35 per cent of global traffic.

It is not as if AI’s malaise was unknown to the Governments in power at different times. There have been several studies, not to mention the Disinvestment Commission’s trenchant report, but the medicines they prescribed were necessarily bitter: Radical trimming of excess personnel (a cut of 25 per cent was at one time urged as the minimum), drastic curtailment of perks, raising productivity to global levels, emoluments strictly linked to productivity, better utilisation of owned aircraft avoiding disproportionate outgo on leasing, discarding of unproductive routes and rationalisation of the retained routes.

Because of the stubborn resistance from within the AI, no Government has so far been able to muster the political will to forge ahead with the three r’s — rationalisation, reorganisation and retrenchment — of rescue package to pull it out of the abyss into which it had fallen.

Instead of addressing issues affecting the very survival of the airline, and the many unresolved problems bedevilling the aviation sector, the Civil Aviation Minister embarked upon a wholly unnecessary and untenable exercise of merging the Indian and AI.

All the energy of the Government, instead of being spent on resuscitating AI, was thus diverted to the next-to-impossible task of resolving the staggering mismatch between the two airlines in respect of the nature of operations, functions, roles, structures, cultures, pay scales, perks, and so on, with no synergy and economies of scale (on which this escapist course was justified) in sight. If the process can be reversed even at this stage, and the plight of AI de-linked for life support there can still be some hope of revival.

The Minister is reportedly planning to pass on the buck to a group of eminent personages such as Messrs Ratan Tata, N. R. Narayana Murthy, Sam Pitroda and S. Ramadorai. Both the ills and the cures have been staring the Ministry in the face for umpteen years, and the eminent group is unlikely to come up with anything revolutionary.

Its success will critically hinge on its having total freedom to determinedly put into effect whatever measures they consider imperative. Absent that freedom, hopes raised will be dashed to the ground, leaving the situation worse than before.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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