Comments
Air India plans to pay its over 20,000 employees their July salaries by tomorrow, a senior airline official said late on Friday.
Accepting that there had been a “slight delay” in paying salaries, the official said that by law the airline is entitled to pay the salaries by the 7th of the month.
“In some months when there are enough funds the salaries are disbursed on the last day of the month while in some others they are given a few days later. This time we received funds to go towards payment of salaries late on Friday evening so the salaries should be credited on Saturday,” the official said.
With the Government starting the process of divestment of the airline, Air India has been finding it difficult to raise funds from banks to meet its financial liabilities.
Passenger load factorThe news about delay in salary payment comes days after Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Civil Aviation informed the Rajya Sabha that the airline’s passenger load factor had improved to 75.6 per cent in 2015-16 from a seat factor of 67.9 per cent in 2011-12. The Minister further said that the number of revenue passengers had increased from 1.34 crore in 2011-12 to 1.8 crore in 2015-16.
The airline’s net loss during 2015-16 was ₹3836.77 crore as against ₹7559.74 crore in 2011-12.
Accumulated lossThe main reason for the loss is that the company is facing financial pressure and earning less profit due to a high debt burden as an offshoot of past accumulated losses, the Minister said adding that the airline’s debt servicing is at around ₹6,000 crore per annum.
Incidentally this is not the first time that Air India has faced problems in paying its employees in its over seven-decade long existence.
In 2010-11 during the tenure of Arvind Jadhav, who was Chairman and Managing Director during the second term of the Manmohan Singh Government, the airline had delayed salary payments to employees.
In May 2011, a large number of employees had gone on a flash strike to protest the delay in payment of salaries which led to cancellation of about 18 Air India flights, including some on the international sectors.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.