It may have been sheer frustration that drove civil aviation minister Ajit Singh to say that India did not really need a national airline, after the Air India pilots’ strike showed no signs of ending after over a week, but it was no thoughtless comment. There is a lot of pragmatism behind Mr Singh’s view that the government should not be in the business of running an airline, at least not in the way it has so far.
To be fair, the minister did tell an interviewer — who asked why Air India was not being run in a more professional way — that most private airlines weren’t doing much better. But the frustration of dealing with a bunch of pilots, who resorted to lies and deceit by reporting “sick” and had got used to becoming a law unto themselves, was evident. To add to his woes, the pilots are being led by an NCP leader who would like nothing better than to embarrass a Congress-supported minister.
It is not that the government is incapable of managing an airline, but then it should be run by technocrats as many of India’s best-run public sector entities are. Not by politicians out to exploit the airline’s assets for their own benefit, with the help of compliant bureaucrats like joint secretaries looking for a quick promotion and thus eager to keep their political bosses happy.
In the past 60 years there have been 15 major disruptions, and over 50 minor ones (like pilots refusing to take flights etc). Every time the pilots brought the management to its knees, with politicians insisting that the troublemakers be taken back with no punishment. This sent the wrong message down the line — from flight engineers to flight attendants and ground engineers, everyone demanded and got their pound of flesh. This state of affairs among pilots has been going on since the 1970s when, after a managing director hired from the private sector quit in disgust, the government made the then director (operations) acting MD. As someone who had led a pilots’ strike himself, this MD introduced a slew of measures giving the pilots undue benefits and luxuries, which no pilot of any major international airline can dream of, that only emboldened them to keep asking for more.
Matters got progressively worse over the years, with politicians consistently overriding commercial decisions, culminating in the hasty, ill-conceived merger of Indian Airlines with Air India. Along with moves like giving up lucrative flights to private carriers, this led to Air India’s virtual bankruptcy, saddled with a debt of `40,000 crores. Even a strong votary of the public sector will now be forced to agree that the government cannot run an airline in India.