Wake up, Big Susie
Here’s the 2018 to-do list for Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju
One of the greatest enigmas of the Narendra Modi cabinet (you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a two-man show) has to be union civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju, at the helm of the aviation ministry since 2014.
Frankly, after Powerful Patel (hardly a day went by without his mug shot in the newspapers) and Ajit Singh — both attention seekers I am firmly convinced — Gajapathi Raju is so low profile that he may well be an illusion. Just to make sure he actually exists, I googled his images the other day. Several reassuring images of his benign presence sprang up. There were some odd remarks and tweets. The minister was quoted as saying he didn’t know who Pawan Kalyan is and that he — this has to be the understatement of the year — believed that “some private carriers had been favoured under the UPA”. Ha ha!
Anyway, let’s not quibble at the start of the year. Let’s begin the year as friends. As a well-meaning friend and just in case the honourable minister is truly awake and not busy tweeting, I made a to-do list for him for 2018.
Mumbai needs new airport capacity. I know we can always land and take off from Seawinds or the Bandra–Worli Sea Link but all things considered these really are not the safest or most viable options. The seaplane idea is cute but unlikely to be sufficient to meet Mumbai’s ever-growing appetite for airport capacity. The Navi Mumbai airport cannot remain an illusion — fond as the minister may be of them.
Abolish DGCA and give us a real safety regulator; not a bunch content with pushing files, looking after the welfare of their own kith and kin and buying fancy motorcars (refer Kith, Kin, Moles and Motorcars , Business Standard, July 13, 2017) all year long. The existing DGCA staff can all be made into “chief harassment officers” and posted across government departments. They can use their skills to harass someone other than the pilots who have been given their undue attention all these years. Most airlines chiefs I know will heave a huge sigh of relief.
Ensure UDAN does not remain only up in the air. It’s true that regional air connectivity can revolutionise the way a country functions but for that to happen we need some credible players in the space. To make sure UDAN does not go the GoAir way (I can never forget Jeh Wadia and his plans to change the way India travels), Jayant Sinha — the architect of this one — may have to spend less time with the media and more on convincing some businessmen to take the plunge.
Even a child can pen this down but at the cost of sounding like a big bore, I’ll say it anyway: sell the national carrier in 2018. I, for one, am tired of hearing myself say this for the last godknows-how-many years: Air India sale is not an option; it is the only way forward. Stop talking about it and as Nike says “just do it”. Put someone on the job, figure out the modalities and bite the bullet. Kindly ignore the advice of the latest parliamentary panel which is seeking five years to revive it.
And last — this is more like an appeal to all the airlines as Gajapathi Raju and Co. can’t really help here — let all the airlines collectively get their act together to make sure IndiGo — the country’s largest airline, does not become a total monopoly, a situation that is likely to do no good to anybody including the airline. In 2017, we saw a few instances of how size can go to some people’s heads and while my sympathy in most of these cases was with the airline, we can’t really expect such instances not to occur. The only way to keep things in check is to ensure that there are good and reliable options.
So, in the end, just to wake up the minister and at the cost of upsetting The Everly Brothers a bit, I’ll end with a popular melody first published in 1957:
“Wake up, Big Susie, wake up/We’ve both been sound asleep/wake up, Big Susie and weep/the year is over, it’s 2018/And we’re in trouble deep/Wake up, Big Susie/We gotta go home”.