Maharaja's poor HR

Air India is a perfect case study of how to reward truant employees

A quick promotion will certainly not be in your wish list if you have been suspended for flouting office rules. But Air India is different. A few months after serving a three-month suspension for refusing to take the obligatory breath test, Captain Arvind Kathpalia was promoted to the position of director, operations of the airline, in June 2017. According to a description for the operation director’s job when Kathpalia got appointed, he was responsible for flight operations, ground operations, and flight safety and training operations.

Nothing could be more farcical than this. Clearly, Air India could not have found a more unfit candidate for a job that needed utmost sensitivity towards flight and passenger safety. The result of such an arbitrary promotion policy has been predictable: Kathpalia, who was also on the airline’s board, failed breathalyser tests just moments before flying from Delhi to London last week.

This isn’t the only case. Three years ago, a senior commander was caught drunk by security officials at the Sharjah airport minutes before he was to operate a flight to Delhi. This was reported to be the third time that the pilot tested positive for alcohol before operating a flight. Surprisingly, it was later found that the pilot’s name was recommended for promotion as an instructor in the airline. “Instructor” is the senior most pilot in an airline. 

There is, however, some merit in the suggestion in some quarters that India’s aviation regulator should take a hard look at the rules, which are among the strictest in the world when it comes to pilots flying drunk. While a zero-tolerance policy for pilots being drunk is laudable, it’s a stretch to have rules that specify that there, literally, cannot be a drop of alcohol in the pilots' bodies. Rule 24 of the Aircraft Rules prohibit crew members from drinking anything alcoholic 12 hours before flying and insist on a breath test before and after their flight. This is against the global average of a “bottle to throttle” period of eight hours, and only random checks. This is not to suggest that drinking by pilots is acceptable, but rules should follow some global benchmarks as well.

Coming back to AI, there are examples galore of the airline’s botched-up human resource (HR) policy, where truant employees are rewarded. For example, consider the productivity-linked incentive (PLI) scheme in the past, which one former member of parliament famously described as nothing but legalised bribe. The irony was that the incentive, which inflated the annual wage bill hugely, was never linked to productivity from the start. Amazingly, the total payment under the PLI often exceeded the airline's losses in a particular year.

Also, the entire incentive scheme was designed to meet the airline's pay-more-for-less policy. Strangely, Air India had pegged the base for the incentive below the average performance level. For example, for on-time performance, the base-performance level for payment under the PLI was fixed at 60 per cent compared to the 65.92 per cent average performance level prior to the scheme.

AI’s HR policy has come under question on other aspects as well. In 2013, for example, the airline appointed four top-level executives at fancy salaries at a time when the airline was losing money heavily and the salaries were delayed for the seventh month in a row. That’s a sure recipe for an HR disaster — the “outsiders” were isolated from day one, with employees resenting their appointments and the owner (the government) expecting a turnaround magic from them “with cooperation of all concerned”.

But that was only part of the problem. One of the appointees — Captain Pawan Arora who was the chief operating officer of AI Express — was removed by the AI board a few months later after it “learnt” that he had been removed from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in which he had been seconded as Flight Operations Inspector from IndiGo. The DGCA’s decision was prompted by the findings that Arora was not qualified for the post. It’s strange how the AI board didn’t have even the basic information about DGCA’s reservations before appointing somebody in such a high profile position. Some habits die hard indeed.