Pradeep Singh Kharola is new Air India CMD

Senior IAS officer Pradeep Singh Kharola has been appointed CMD of disinvestment bound Air India, the government said on Tuesday. Kharola would take over from Rajiv Bansal, who was given an extension only last week.

Senior IAS officer Pradeep Singh Kharola ( pictured) has been appointed the chairman and managing director of disinvestment-bound Air India, the government said on Tuesday.

The 1985-batch Karnataka cadre officer would take over from Rajiv Bansal, who was given a three-month extension only last week.

Kharola has the distinction of making a public transport undertaking — the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation — profitable in 2000, the first in the country. It enabled the city transport undertaking to deploy air- conditioned buses, which are common across cities now. BMTC has been profitable almost every year since then.

However, Kharola's biggest role has been implementing the Bengaluru Metro, a task that was compounded by the rocky terrain of the city, which makes it expensive and time consuming to go underground. The first phase of 42 km took a decade to complete — half his term as the Metro boss. He has been the managing director of Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd since February 2015. The soft-spoken Kharola, a PhD in public transport systems from IIT-Delhi, had set an ambitious target of 2020 to complete the second phase of 72 km.

He also led a unique public-private initiative of getting corporates to build stations, helping reduce costs. Before the Metro stint, he was involved in raising funds from international institutions to build infrastructure across cities. This expertise would help him as the government looks at disinvestment of Air India.

Kharola was the principal secretary for Jagadish Shettar, the BJP chief minister who had a short term in 2012-13.

A senior ministry official termed the appointment as a procedural step. “His primary job will be to minimise losses at Air India and to run the airline as a going concern till it gets a buyer,” he said.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs had in June given its in-principle nod for the strategic disinvestment of Air India. The carrier, which has a debt burden of more than ~50,000 crore, managed to eke out operational profit for the first time in a decade in 2015-16. Under a turnaround plan approved by the previous government, Air India was to receive up to ~30,231 crore from the government, subject to meeting certain performance thresholds. The 10-year bailout package began from 2012. So far, the embattled carrier has received around ~26,000 crore under the package.