‘We will position AI as great global airline’
NEWDELHI: The civil aviation ministry wants to strengthen Air India before restarting the process of privatising the state-owned airline. In an interview, minister of state for civil aviation Jayant Sinha tells that the government will soon announce a comprehensive package for the national carrier and a supportive policy for the entire aviation industry by working on the tax structure. Edited excerpts:
Faizan Haidar
balanced proposition for any bidder. I think it is really industry conditions which have turned quite adverse. As you know the airlines have done poorly in the last quarter and the quarter before that because of high interest rates, high oil prices, as well as the weakening rupee. Our goal in the disinvestment process was to provide a balanced offer for sale which is what we did. tions; government is fully committed for disinvestment of Air India. As I said, the government is committed to ensuring that Air India receives all the necessary financial resources and has the liquidity to be able to operate as a really competitive global airline. We are working on a comprehensive package. ees a competitive set of terms and competitive package...we are working on it. We have had many rounds of discussions in the government on this. The airline industry is a cyclical industry and there are obviously periods when it does very well and then there are periods when it doesn’t do as well. Right now we are going through a difficult part of the cycle and our goal as a ministry is be able to provide a supportive policy environment for the entire industry so that players can flourish and provide the best possible services to passengers.
There are many elements to a supportive policy, one of them of course is to bring ATF (aviation turbine fuel) into GST (goods and services tax), on which we have spent considerable time and effort working with the ministry of finance. Then there are a variety of other taxes that also we think should be optimised for the industry.
After the implementation of GST, the overall tax burden for the industry has increased. And so we want to be able to bring it back to where it was. There is a variety of other things we are doing in terms of ease of doing business and enabling borrowing various types that we think will lead to a supportive policy environment. We have a very extensive programme underway to increase capacity everywhere, whether it is in terms of getting to an airport, terminal capacity, aerobridge capacity or runway capacity— every element of airport capacity we are looking at. We are also looking at building entirely new airports. Over all our effort is to increase capacity 4-5 times.
We have taken a 15-20-year view. One more item on the capacity expansion is Digiyatra, It will also significantly increase the capacity of airport because throughput is going to increase.
That means more people will be able to move through the entire airport system. It is very close to implementation right now; what has taken time is to be able to work out a scheme which is acceptable to all the relevant stakeholders that includes the airport, the airlines, the security agencies as well as the unique identity authority because whatever we do has to be able to meet all of the privacy and public safety and the surveillance worry that people have brought up.
So we have to design a system that is very, very futureproof in that regard and to do that has taken this time. We will create a biometric system and it will include very safe and secure biometric authentication process. The draft on drones got a large number of inputs.
We have finished all consultations and will be announcing the drone policy very shortly.
It will be an entire roadmap on how regulations will evolve in future. We have put that in place as well.
It is very forward looking. The passenger charter is also largely complete and will be notified shortly.