Every country has a national airline which projects the image of the country to the rest of the World. Some of the national airlines of the likes of Singapore Airlines, Swiss Air, etc have set benchmarks in customer service and quality of flight experience which many private airlines find it difficult to match up. But when it comes to the national carrier of India, we Indians shy away from even travelling in it, leave alone feeling proud of it. Once Air India and Indian Airlines were the only airlines and we didn't have a choice. Currently Air India and Indian Airlines combine have a market share of meager 15%. I don't think air travel in the country would be impacted if we really close down this ailing airlines. The private players would surely be more than happy to serve a larger customer base.
Both Air India and Indian Airlines have come a long way from their glory days. Now with both of them having merged, the mess this combined entity has got into is even bigger. Thanks to an extremely inefficient and bureaucratic way of running business, the national carrier of India is nothing more than a money guzzler. Never in the last decade or more, have I heard that the airline is not in some financial crunch! The airline made some aggressive purchases of new aircraft running into billions of dollars when it did not even have the capacity to repay any time soon. There has been a stage when the earnings from the running of the airline is just sufficient to pay the interest on the huge debt the airline has on its books. Every now and then the airline faces problem in even paying salaries to its employees.
Over the last 3-4 years, Air India has hired numerous consulting firms to advise them on how to "Turn Around" the sick giant. Interestingly the consulting fees paid by Air India for these assignments ran into several crores of Rupees without any meaningful implementation and impact on the fortunes of the airline. The people at the helm of the carrier seemed the least interested in making the unit profitable because the airline was more profitable for their personal gains. I don't want to delve too much into the personal integrity of anyone because sooner or later I am sure investigations would start into the dealings of the senior management of Air India.
Recently the government approved an additional capital infusion of some Rs 6600 cr! This is just one of the many events when huge cash was dolled out to the airline in the hope that things would turn around. But I feel, this is not an easy job to do as the Airline is run with the mindset of an old bureaucratic system.
I think the airline needs to change its policy of keeping employees till retirement. this builds a lot of complacency in the system. More professional and expert hands are needed to make the airlines competitive. I guess its time the government took a decision that does it really need to keep running a substandard airline because of prestige issues or close it down. If prestige issues really matter, I guess they need to really improve the flight experience and customer service at Air India. For the record, latest report from Aviation sector shows that Air India has the lowest on time flight performance in the entire industry. Whereas Jet Airways leads the pack with 91% on-time flight performance, Air India has the figure at a low 71%!! Analysts said Air India employees were slow in clearing and loading aircraft and conducting passengers to their seat....There is definitely lot of room for improvement and the Airline has a long way to go before it becomes the first choice for travelling within India.
No comments:
Post a Comment