Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Does Air India really deserve the bailout money?

We all know the top 3 Airlines in India (Air India, Jet Airways, Kingfisher) all are running in red and now Air India wants Rs 10,000 crores ($2 Billion) of tax payers bailout money. My question is does Air India really deserve the bailout money? What has the airline done in the past 20 years to keep itself as the pioneer airline from India. There are series of mis-management from aircraft maintenance, unprofessional and lazy staff to old aircrafts and bad service. Should the government do what its best usage is - ie, govern instead of running airlines. Should'nt the airlines actually learn from Indian Railways in terms of competition and keeping it real.
I read an interesting blog by Rajesh Kalra in times of india - mentioning about freeloaders. I completely agree with this view point - with bunch of politicians getting freebees from the airlines how can it actually ever be competitive.
Here's my two cents on what the government should do
1) Privatize the Air India, Air India Express, India Airlines brands - bring in better management from airline industry to run the company, make accountability and profitability as number one priority.
2) Provide interim bailout money for the purpose of transitioning the airline from government run agency to making it a private company
3) revamp the service offerings, better services, more rounded routes, better codeshare partnerships, trim down the new excessive aircraft orders to only the ones required to replace the oldest fleet.
4) hire a world class firm to redo its logistics and ROI model for capacity planning and routing. Jointly operate maintenance with in-house and outsource firms (transition to better quality resources)
5) Re-define services - hopefully if the airline gets privatized the staff would have to retrain to earn their salary. (if they can only learn from peer airlines - Jet, Kingfisher, GoAir, Spice). Make staff more accountable and remove the government job status.
6) No Political Interference - dis-allow freeloaders like politicians, friends and family. Let them buy the tickets thru regular channels and make their spending and travel more transparent to the general public.
7) Finally actually compete with the other airlines on the basis of quality of service rather than sheer fleet size and shadow of government regulations.

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