Strong case for privatisation of AI
The Air India saga continues to unfold in its dismal. It is not the first time that this tragic farce is being played out and certainly will not be the last if Air India continues as a public sector enterprise (PSE).
The
answer to the simple question as to who benefits from this ongoing mess is a rather straightforward one. Continuing with Air India as a public sector enterprise serves the entrenched vested interest of no more than a hundred thousand persons, including the employees in a country of 1.2 billion!! Its continuation as a PSE has no strategic implications and not even in the wildest stretch of imagination does it serve the interest of either the poor or the so called
There is though one patently spurious argument in support of its continued status as a PSE. This is about connecting far flung and sparsely populated regions of our country and for serving the annual air travel needs of the religious pilgrims. This argument is as spurious as saying that villages can be connected to the telecom network only by BSNL and only public sector road transport services can connect rural destinations.
Both these arguments have been proved totally false in real life experience. And even the slightest bit of honest thinking will reveal to all concerned that public service objectives can be far more efficiently achieved by a judicious and well-regulated operation of the public private partner- ship, with the government partly footing the bill as in viability gap funding. contemplate getting there. So any attempt to find a 'solution' or fix the problem within the present framework is bound to fail as happened in a previous phase when the Air India's Board with leading lights from the corporate world tried to devise a plan to revive it.