The recent spate of aviation disasters has once again focussed the attention of global aviation authorities on Asia. If India believes it is immune from this scrutiny, it is mistaken. Last week’s decision by the United Nations’ aviation watchdog, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), to conduct another safety audit in India just three years after the last one (the usual interval is six years), as well as the US aviation regulator the Federal Aviation Authority’s move to delay reviewing its rating of India’s air safety, underscore the need to urgently address air safety issues. The last ICAO audit had placed India in a list of 13 worst-performing nations in terms of air safety. At that time, the civil aviation ministry and the domestic aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), had sought to downplay the matter by claiming that the rating was due to certain “procedural” lapses and was not necessarily a comment on India’s air safety record. The FAA downgrade also evoked similar responses.

But the issues raised by ICAO and FAA run far deeper than mere lapses in procedures or documentation. The DGCA, for instance, has been able to appoint only 45 flight operations inspectors, despite Cabinet approval for 75 such personnel — the minimum strength dictated by the size of India’s civil aviation fleet. This means that the FAA’s review in March is unlikely to improve India’s categorisation. There is an acute shortage of air traffic controllers and engineering inspectors. Routine regulatory oversight at the airport level is mostly missing, or has been delegated to the airlines, which leads to a clear conflict of interest. On the other hand, pilots and air crew have been complaining of rising fatigue levels and the lack of adequate programmed rest breaks, as under-pressure airline managements struggle to squeeze the most out of their men and machines. In a competitive market facing severe financial stress, there will be the temptation to bend the rules, if not break them. It is for the regulator to step in and draw the line, something the DGCA is neither equipped to nor apparently even willing to do at the moment. So much so that a leading aviation expert dubbed safety oversight in India a “joke” (‘Passengers are riding on luck’, BusinessLine , February 10).

If so, the joke is singularly unfunny. The explosive growth in India’s civil aviation sector has tended to focus both user and policy attention on the infrastructure side of the story. This is understandable as rapid growth has increased pain points both for airlines and passengers. But safety has to be an equally important yardstick to measure success by. Ensuring that the men who keep this complex system going are not only trained and equipped to do their jobs, but are doing them in full compliance with the rules, is squarely the job of the regulator, one which cannot be delayed or delegated. It is high time the Centre spared serious policy and budgetary bandwidth for this.

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