A lot of hopes are riding on Air India’s new Chief Operating Officer, Gustav Baldauf. Whether his previous stint as a vice president of rival Jet Airways will help him is to be seen, but it would be foolhardy to expect that the airline’s problems can be solved by one change. The airline has been bleeding for many decades now, and mostly for reasons to do with its ownership. A former employee, Jitender Bhargava outlined some of these the other day (“The cost of being a PSU”, April 3), but these are not the major reasons. The major reasons are uneconomic flight schedules, often to places which bureaucrats/politicians want; extra manpower; poor choice of routes; discontinuing of non-stop trans-Atlantic flights; among others.
If the government is really serious about turning the airline around, it will have to deal with these issues. But since there is very little possibility of this happening, the only solution lies in selling off the airline. Nothing else will work.
Sanjay Kumar, New Delhi
Readers should write to:
The Editor, Business Standard,
Nehru House,
4, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg,
New Delhi 110 002,
Fax: (011) 23720201;
letters@bsmail.in