The Hindu Business Line : `Consistency' in the skies

THE Union Civil Aviation Minister, Mr Praful Patel, should be congratulated for retaining the very scarce quality of consistency in Government policy, especially when it comes to protecting the interests of certain domestic civil aviation outfits, whether in the public or private sector.

Of course, the story goes back to a time when Mr Patel was nowhere on the scene as far as the top echelons of Indian governance were concerned.

So he can safely be absolved of the charge that he had any hand in crafting the blatantly protectionist policy in domestic civil aviation in the latter half of the 1990s, when all sorts of non-arguments were advanced to keep new airlines from entering the domestic civil aviation scene.

But the problem is that, wittingly or unwittingly, Mr Patel today finds himself in a position in which his august predecessors in the United Front and NDA Governments found themselves when the wind of liberalisation was blowing hard against the closed door of civil aviation — and this after the first whiff of fresh air had already flowed into the strictly public sector domain of Indian civil aviation in the shape of a number of private airlines beginning operations in the domestic skies in the early 1990s.

At one level, this is certainly an intriguing development where Union Civil Aviation Ministers belonging to different political persuasions and ruling the roost at different points of time have all been painted with the same protectionist brush.

At another (if the factor of coincidence can be ruled out, which it should be on grounds of rationality), the inference is clear — namely, that there are powerful vested interests on the domestic civil aviation scene who will leave no stone unturned, whatever the political colour of the powers that be, to protect their turf — even if they realise that their efforts can be successful only in the short to medium term because of the inexorability of the ongoing liberalisation and globalisation process.

Perhaps this is why a domestic civil aviation policy has been so long in the making, the latest official input in that direction being the exhaustive report of the Naresh Chandra Committee.

However, if experience is any guide, it will be more than surprising if a considered national policy is hammered out on the basis of the Committee's work in the foreseeable future, and this because the protectionist elements on the domestic civil aviation scene would much rather prefer a sphere of operation not fettered by such policy restraints.

Indeed, even in the new scenario chalked out by the Union Civil Aviation Ministry and just approved by the Union Cabinet, a certain amount of "ad hocism" has been built into the scheme of things in the shape of Mr Patel's unsolicited balm that the new norms "are not sacrosanct and we can revise these guidelines in the next one to two years".

The issue is simple: if the new norms are not sacrosanct, why have they been mooted and accepted at this point of time, especially when the fundamentals involve injecting healthy competition into the functioning of the economy?

More important, if the central issue is that Indian carriers flying the world's skies need to have a "proven" record of their capability — which will have to be established by their performance in the domestic skies for five long years (the basic inference here being that domestic air-travellers can be used as guinea pigs for the benefit of those flying abroad) — there can be no rational reason why this specific requirement, which is considered so crucial today for the country's reputation abroad, should become less important tomorrow.

The long and the short of it — as the Air Deccan chief, Mr G. R. Gopinath, has put it — is that the Government is indulging in "selective liberalisation" in the sphere of civil aviation which, clearly, is not in the nationalinterest.

Briefly, if an airline has been certified by the authorities as being safe to fly between Kolkata and Bhubaneswar, there is no rational reason why the same airline cannot be considered safe to fly people from Kolkata to Dhaka or Bangkok?

At the end of it all, the Government will, of course, do what it wants to do. But Mr Patel — and those who have framed the Civil Aviation Ministry's recommendation — should know that there is another point of view, and one that is probably a shade more persuasive than the indefensible stand the authorities have taken.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

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