A report in Business Standard states the first meeting of the Group of Ministers (GoM) to discuss funding options for cash-strapped Air India remained inconclusive today and it will meet again in a week. The government plans to infuse Rs 5,000 crore — Rs 2,000 crore in the form of equity and rest to fund the functioning — in the bleeding airline, which has an equity capital of Rs 145 crore. Air India has losses of around Rs 7,200 crore on its books and has debt of Rs 15,000 crore on its books. Of this, Rs 11,000 crore are high-cost debt.
In a previous post, Air India – The Cashless Maharajah I had mentioned the problems ailing the Air India. The Airlines in an attempt to trim costs announced to cut the productivity-linked incentive (PLI) of all 31,000 employees by 50 per cent, which was objected by the unions. Later, the airline management announced to cut the PLI ranging from 25 per cent to 50 per cent, which was objected by executive pilots. The airline then had to roll back the cut for executive pilots and a committee was set to look into the same.
In a candid interview with Businessworld, Arun Jadhav, the Chairman and Managing Director of Air India mentioned the problems facing the airline. To sum up these are:
- Air India has 32,000 employees compared with 12,000 “in any like-to-like company”.
- Employees are not conscious of working for a business in crisis.
- Pilots “sitting at home” are paid “80 hours of flying allowances”.
- Despite a freeze on recruitment, “we have recruited”.
- “There is a duplication of every activity and no single chain of command”.
- “Revenues are 14,000 crore and costs are Rs19,000 crore” (approx $2.9bn and $3.9bn)
- “We have 22 offline stations where we no longer fly”.
- “We have an alarming number of aircraft (25) and engines (33) on standby”.
- For 800 business class seats from Delhi, 750 meals are ordered but there are only 400 travelers – “no-one knows” where the other 350-400 go.
I recently installed Airtel DTH at my village in Shimla District. The dish was installed on Tuesday, 6th October, 2009. The person who installed the dish assured me that it would be activated within 4 hours time. By 7 pm, 5 hours later there was no sign of any program on the dish. I called up the retailer and was informed that Airtel system was down and would be activated the next day.
Next day, I kept on calling the retailer who in turn gave me the number of the dealer in Shimla, who in turn gave me the number of the call center. Between the four of us, the dish was finally activated on Friday, October 9, 2009. It was an terrible ordeal for 4 days and I ended spending almost Rs. 500/ on phone calls alone.
Pictures from my recent Hanol – Hatkoti trip. Had a ‘wonderful’ trip with three flat tyres in a span of 8 hours. Finally got stuck in Tikkar forest at 8 pm. With no tyre to spare, spent the night in the car at Pujarli as was too tired to drive back to Rohru. Too tired to write my rant. Posting pictures of my trip.
Hatkoti Temple
