Ajit Singh should be held to his promise of restoring the downgrade of DGCA, India’s civil aviation regulator, by March. It is hard to believe that systemic flaws can be set right in eight weeks.
Particularly in election season, with a reputed IPS officer set to challenge Singh in Baghpat, UP.History is another reason to disbelieve the Civil Aviation Minister and Prabhat Kumar, the new DGCA he appointed in a desperate attempt to stave off Friday’s downgrade.
Mexico, in the backyard of the US, took four months to recover when it was similarly whipped in 2010, despite a steady source of check pilots. Israel took 4 years. And Philippines and Indonesia haven’t recovered despite 5 and 6 years of efforts, respectively!
A damning report by CAPA, an advisory in the sector, of India’s neglect of her regulatory framework** offers valuable context.Even as civil aviation traffic from 2004-09 nearly trebled by an incremental 29.1 million - 8 times the increase in any comparable 5 years in our history, in 2009 itself the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) had to warn DGCA of a downgrade.
A flurry of activity followed - but only till the time our category I rating was renewed. Complacency returned soon enough. And how!
In 2009, the DGCA estimated that it needed a workforce of 928 instead of just 400 folks on the rolls at that time. Of this shortage of 528, the “critical shortfall” was estimated at 427. Particularly so in the directorates of air worthiness, flight standards and air safety.
In these crucial operations, we had only 79 grade ‘A” directors against a sanctioned strength of 300.And what happened to the shortage of 528IJ As of 2013, only 67 full-time employees have been recruited. Another 62 have been added as consultants and secondees!
Traffic, meanwhile, expanded by 50 per cent more - so the shortfall (even as we ignore conflict of interest of consultants and secondees)only got compounded.
CAPA assures that despite this criminal neglect in oversight, the safety of all airlines in India isn’t necessarily poor. They’re being diplomatic. There’s cascading impact beyond Singh’s pious promise to clean up the mess, and Air-India’s that the FAA downgrade won’t affect their candidature for Star Alliance (a club of airlines that chucked the Maharaja out only recently and I must flag the half-truth here: even if admitted to Star Alliance, any category I carrier willnot be able to code share with it, till India languishes in categoryII):
1) Jet Airways has got one hell of a bloody nose. Thanks to the downgrade, chairman Naresh Goyal (and the Maharaja) can’t add any more flights to the US. May be, this isn’t even their plan - a battered Maharaja has no planes to spare, and Goyal firmly in the grip of Etihad of the UAE as a feeder to the sheikh’s own airline/airport for the traffic to Europe or the US.
But duplication of maintenance costs, vulnerability to surprise checks at US airports, and higher lease costs and premia on insurance will dent Goyal, as also Rohit Nandan, Government’s lead to revive theMaharaja.
2) The downgrade is yet another dampner for Tata-SIA. The venture has been struggling to get off the ground for 10 years thanks mainly to the nexus between the civil aviation ministry and Jet Airways. And without enough meat on the bone in the domestic business and Ajit Singh keeping him hanging on whether they can fly overseas without having a minimum of 20 aircraft and 5 years of track record, Cyrus Mistry, the Tata Sons chief, would have surely hoped for a toe-hold in the US market in the years to come.
But thanks to the mess that Ajit Singh inherited, and then presided over since December 2011, it isn’t just Jet and Air-India who stand barred from adding new flights to the US, Tata-SIA or any other Indian carrier is disqualified similarly!
Add pile ups and delays that stare Indian carriers in the US, we’re talking here of an entire 10 per cent of India’s civil aviation market deserting our airline companies.
The mantri’s boys have been leaking stories that the FAA snub is a retaliation to l’affaire Khobragade. Can they reconcile how FAA threatened a downgrade in 2009 when diplomatic Devyani Khobragade, her maid Sangeeta Richard and New York state prosecutor Preet Bharara came into the picture in end-2013!
Won’t it be nicer if the minister very kindly spent the next 8 weeks getting DGCA in order and got Salman Khurshid’s foreign office to work with the European Union and Japan lest they too downgrade us similarlyIJ
(The columnist is CEO & Co-Founder, India Stategy Group, Hammurabi & Solomon Consulting. Foww tweets @therohitbansal).