Information Commissioner Sushma Singh told the officials of National Aviation Company of India Limited, the company formed after the merger of Air India and Indian Airlines, to give the details of 'pay, perks and privileges' enjoyed by its chairman, managing director and functional directors to Right to Information activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal.
On the issue of unionism, he said that problems at hand were not being duly dealt with.
The purge in Washington does not pause the war. Strikes continue, Hormuz remains closed, and Brent crude is still dancing around $109 a barrel. For India, the command chaos in the Pentagon is another layer of uncertainty piled on five weeks of conflict that was already straining every buffer Delhi has.
These views were expressed by Air India chairman and managing director Arvind Jadhav at his meetings with leaders of 14 unions, where he is understood to have articulated various scenarios which could arise if costs were not managed well.
With the Iran war escalating sharply and crisis deepening in the global energy market, India on Monday unveiled a coordinated plan to support exporters and shippers caught in the fallout.
Air-India (A-I) chairman and managing director Vasudevan Thulasidas and Jet Airways chairman Naresh Goyal have a common agenda: to get their airlines among Asia's top five by 2010 in terms of size and service.
Employees can be sent on LWP for six months or for a period of two years extendable up to five years, depending upon the following factors - suitability, efficiency, competence, quality of performance, health of the employee, instance of non-availability of the employee for duty in the past as a result of ill health or otherwise and redundancy.
Air India has deployed a B787 Dreamliner aircraft for the Delhi-Moscow-Delhi sector and offered attractive promotional fares.
AI's chairman and managing director, Arvind Jadhav, and the ministry's joint secretary and airline board member Prashant Sukul, along with other senior officials, met half the unions today in Delhi. The meeting will continue on Friday and they will also meet the rest of the 14 unions.
Biggest problem that Nandan faces is being able to simultaneously improve Air India's earnings and decrease debt.
Enormous debt isn't the only thing afflicting Air India. Its work culture is an equal culprit in its downfall.
He's taking charge of a carrier which is in the midst of dealing with a new reality. The ink on the merger is not yet dry and the internal politics has led to groupism within the senior management. Predictably, management attention has been diverted to handling personnel issues rather than on the core function of running the airline.
The CBI has closed a case against former Air India CMD Arvind Jadhav and others over alleged corruption in the appointments of general managers after the central government refused to grant its sanction to prosecute him, officials said. The agency had booked Jadhav, then general manager L P Nakhwa (now retired), and then additional general managers A Kathpalia, Amitabh Singh and Rohit Bhasin after a year-long preliminary enquiry, they said. It was alleged that Jadhav had constituted illegal/irregular promotion panel to recommend suitable candidates for promotion to the post of general manager (operations), they said.
Anjuli Bhargava's musings on why the national carrier is well beyond a turnaround.
India's electric two-wheeler (e2W) manufacturers have urged the government to extend subsidies under the PM E-Drive (Electric Drive Revolution in Innovative Vehicle Enhancement) scheme beyond March 2026, cautioning that a withdrawal could slow near-term demand even as confidence in long-term electric mobility adoption remains intact.
According to airline sources, the software, which is of Atlanta-based SITA company, was not functioning approximately from 3 am to 9 am on Saturday. Consequently, boarding passes could not be issued at major airports across the world and various flights were delayed.
When the Tatas re-boarded Air India on January 27 last year, the price of aviation turbine fuel was at over Rs 80,000 per kilolitre. Rupee was trading at around Rs 74 to a US dollar. The Omicron variant of Covid-19 was in prevalence - barely a week earlier, India had reported over 340,000 cases on a single day. Seven-day home quarantine of international travellers was the norm.
Keeping in sync with the international trend, Chairman and Managing Director V Thulasidas of Air-India on Saturday said he favoured it should be merged with the domestic carrier Indian Airlines.
Air-India is hiring over 150 pilots over the next 18 months as part of its expansion plans, the airline chairman and managing director, V Thulasidas, said on Friday.
In the message posted by Tata Group on X, he also said the group will cover the medical expenses of those injured and ensure that they receive all necessary care and support.
Israel has for more than two decades and several US presidencies worked to draw the United States into a full-scale war with Iran. Having finally achieved that, the last thing it wants is Trump declaring victory and going home, as he is prone to do. Ali Larijani was the figure most capable of handing Trump a negotiated exit with something to show for it. Without Larijani, the road to an exit gets considerably narrower. Prem Panicker continues his must read daily blog on the Gulf War.
CBI case against Air-India MD, predecessors
Air India's entire European operations are carried out with Boeing Dreamliner planes.
Kharola leads from the front. As a team player, he also uses technology to improve processes whether it is training or assessing metrics, a key trait that would help to improve service quality of the national carrier.
'I don't think it is right to remove him over one lapse. The focus should be on restoring operations, not on removing a key management personnel.'
Raghu Menon, special secretary and financial advisor in the civil aviation ministry, has been appointed the chairman and managing director of Air India, ending weeks of speculation over the issue.The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet approved the name of Menon, a 1974 batch IAS officer of the Assam-Nagaland cadre, after a keen race for the top job in the National Aviation Company of India Limited (NACIL), which runs the merged national carrier.
Virtually addressing employees of Air India across the globe, he said for the airline to be the best again there will be an organisational redesign, and it will "require a huge transformation, probably the largest transformation and the change all of you would ever go through". The carrier will expand its "outreach both domestically and internationally" and it has the desire to connect India with every part of the globe, he added.
'We will continue supporting those affected long after the work in Ahmedabad is done.'
Cash-strapped Air India should be run by professionals even if the government partially off-loads its stake to investors to keep it off-the-ground, a top global aviation professional has said.
Facing the heat of the financial crisis that has hit the aviation sector, state-owned Air India on Thursday said it is considering a plan to give 3-5 years leave without pay to about 15,000 of its staff.
Consumer durables makers are hopeful that the government's proposal to reduce goods and services tax (GST) on air conditioners and television panels above 32 inches to 18 per cent would help revive the sector.
But selectively, with regulatory scrutiny and special approval, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The airline had made a three-year turnaround plan in 2009-10.
"The strategic divestment transaction of Air India successfully concluded today with transfer of 100 per cent shares of Air India to M/s Talace Pvt Ltd along with management control," DIPAM secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey said in a tweet. A new board, led by the strategic partner, takes charge of Air India, he added.
On Monday, the five independent directors of the company -- Anand Mahindra of Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry's secretary general Amit Mitra, Ambuja Realty chairman Harsh Neotia and former air chief Fali H Major -- met Prime Minister's principal secretary T K A Nair and reportedly expressed their anguish over the appointments being made by the company.
Ola Electric on Thursday said it has forayed into the country's Rs 1 lakh crore battery energy storage systems market, which is projected to grow to over Rs 3 lakh crore by 2030.
The loss-making airline has already started using food items stocked from India during its onward journey to Stockholm, Copenhagen, Birmingham and Madrid, and use them when returning. It has said food items purchased from these foreign cities are much more expensive when compared to Indian cities.
The government on Monday signed the share purchase agreement with Tata Sons for the sale of national carrier Air India for Rs 18,000 crore. Earlier this month, the government had accepted an offer by Talace Pvt Ltd, a unit of the holding company of the salt-to-software conglomerate, to pay Rs 2,700 crore cash and take over Rs 15,300 crore of the airline's debt. Following that, on October 11 a Letter of Intenet (LoI) was issued to the Tata Group confirming the government's willingness to sell its 100 per cent stake in the airline.
In an open letter to the employees, Air India Chairman and Managing Director Arvind Jadhav said, "Our issues are complex and can only be resolved through sustained dialogue. Any ad hoc decision would only complicate the matter further. You should understand that at this juncture, demands of one category of employees cannot be addressed in isolation."
Air India is a brand, a brand symbolising the nation, especially amongst the Indian diaspora and travellers overseas.
