With about 70 per cent posts vacant, the Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has admitted to inadequate staff strength to meet the daily workload.
In a statement to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Travel, Tourism and Culture, the DGCA has shown that 416 out of 587 “Group A” posts, consisting of prime technical jobs, are vacant. The DGCA expects to fill these vacancies by 2012.
The Committee, headed by CPI(M)’s Sitaram Yechury, has raised questions about DGCA’s efficiency in granting approvals, licences for activities, including airworthiness, maintenance/repair of aircrafts, standard of training institutes, competence of trainees and skill of pilots.
“How efficiently DGCA is fulfiling these mandates with a highly depleted manpower can be anyone’s guess. In such a situation, instances of obtaining pilots licences on the basis of fake certificates should not come as a surprise to anybody,” the committee observed.
| KEY VACANCIES IN DGCA | ||
| Department | Sanctioned strength | Present staff strength |
| Flying standard | 43 | 16 |
| Airdome standard | 46 | 9 |
| Airworthiness | 249 | 61 |
| Air safety | 81 | 15 |
| Air transport | 9 | 1 |
| Flying training | 10 | 0 |
| Training licensing | 26 | 3 |
Slamming the “weak” in-house supervisory and vigilance system of the DGCA, the Yechury panel has asked “that the entire licencing system needs to be streamlined and made transparent by making it available in the public domain. There should be a separate body, either a directorate in DGCA or an outside agency, for keeping strict vigil in this regard so such instances (corruption) do not recur at all.”
It has also asked the government to create an independent authority to probe accident cases.
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“Nowhere in the world does the regulator acts, as the investigator. Railway accidents are probed by an agency of the civil aviation ministry. Then why shouldn’t air accidents be probed by an outside organisation?” asked Yechury.
Hours after the news of the death of Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu in a chopper crash reached Delhi, Yechury’s panel published a report which said out of 1,029 aircrafts (including choppers), 120 are not capable of operating in hilly terrains.
Yechury noted out the crippled DGCA is unlikely to properly monitor if these aircraft are operating in the hills. It has asked for augmenting the training facilities for helicopter pilots.