AI's performance has improved: Economic Survey

Air India is likely to come out of its precarious financial position this financial year with a positive cash flow, as its performance has improved considerably, the Economic Survey said today.

"It is expected that the company will achieve positive EBIDTA (earnings before income, taxes, depreciation and amoritization) in the results for the Financial Year 2012-13," the government's key economic document, tabled in Parliament, said.

It said the national carrier had registered "an all-round enhanced performance" like on-time performance at 85 per cent, passenger load factor at 70.9 per cent and yield at Rs 4.31 per revenue passenger kilometre.

"For the first half of the year, performance has been in line with the target set in the Turnaround Plan," it said.

Air India, the Survey said, had taken several initiatives to cut costs and enhance revenues like route rationalisation, phasing out and grounding of old fleet, freezing of employment in non-operational areas, leveraging assets of the company to increase MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) revenue and revenue from the company's real estate properties.

As part of its Turnaround Plan, the airline had also initiated measures to operationalise subsidiary companies in ground handling and MRO and transferring manpower and equipment to them to make them independent profit centres.

The Survey said that domestic passenger traffic had "marginally" declined from 108 million between January and November 2011 to 106 million in the same period last year.

However, international traffic handled at Indian airports went up to 37.8 million during January-November 2012 as against 36.20 million during the corresponding period of the previous year.

Regarding air cargo, the Survey said global cargo

throughput at Indian airports during January-November 2012 was 1.30 million metric tonnes as against 1.37 MMT in 2011.

Domestic cargo throughput during the same period last year stood at 0.73 MMT, which was almost the same as in the corresponding period the previous year.

Regarding developments on the airport infrastructure front, it said the 12th Plan has envisaged an investment of Rs 65,000 crore at Indian airports, of which a contribution of about Rs 50,000 crore was estimated to come from the private sector.

To enhance airport infrastructure, modernisation of existing airport infrastructure in metro and non-metro cities and construction of greenfield airports were contemplated in the Plan.

Noting that the Airports Authority of India (AAI) was a major airport operator managing 125 airports across the country, the Survey said it had completed expansion and upgradation of two metro airports at Kolkata and Chennai at the cost of Rs 2,325 crore and Rs 2,015 crore respectively.

In addition, restructuring and modernisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports were also undertaken at a cost of about Rs 25,000 crore with state-of-the-art facilities. Expansion of Bangalore International Airport Ltd was carried out at an estimated cost of Rs 1,479 crore.