During the second phase of the Vande Bharat Mission, 30,000 Indians are being brought back in India from 31 countries on board 149 flights between May 16 and 22.
Two aborted missions, three different ministers, multiple rule changes and two decades later, Indian taxpayers will no longer have to pay Rs 20 crore per day to keep the loss-making Air India flying. While opposition Congress expectedly attacked the decision as selling the family silver, DIPAM secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey said what Tata is getting is not a cash cow but an airline which is bleeding where money needs to be pumped in to refurbish obsolete aircraft and dust up strangled ones while being unable to touch any employee for one year and only be able to resize staff after paying a VRS. "It won't be a very easy task there. Only advantage is they (new Air India owner) are paying the price which they think they can manage. "They are not taking the excessive debt accumulated to fund years of losses. We are continuing it as an ongoing concern.... This process has also saved huge amount of taxpayers money going forward," Pandey told PTI.
The 184 passengers on board the Air India Express plane from Dubai that crashed on Friday evening had waited a long time to get tickets on the repatriation flight, part of the Centre's Vande Bharat Mission to bring back Indians stranded abroad in the coronavirus pandemic. For some, the homecoming never happened. 18 people were killed, including the two pilots.
He also assured the kin of victims that steps would be taken to get them compensation in line with an international convention of International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). Taking stock of the crash of the Dubai-Kozhikode AIE flight in Kozhikode and the relief measures, the minister said pilot in-command of the plane, Captain Deepak Vasant Sathe, among those killed in the accident, was one of the most experienced commanders with more than 10,000 flying hours.
A group of 219 employees of Air India along with a private financial institution have submitted an expression of interest (EOI) for the national carrier.
After a hiatus of nearly two decades, the government's programme to privatise state-owned firms restarted with the handing over of debt-laden national carrier Air India to the Tata Group. With the new owner shelling out Rs 18,000 crore for the buyout of the 'Maharaja', this would be the highest-ever amount garnered through privatisation, and is even more than the cumulative sum mopped up through strategic sales from 1999-00 to 2003-04. The government had in October last year inked the share purchase agreement with the Tata Group for sale of national carrier Air India for Rs 18,000 crore. Tatas would pay Rs 2,700 crore cash and take over Rs 15,300 crore of the airline's debt.
To attract bidders, the government had decided to hive of around Rs 35,000 crore of the company's debt into a separate subsidiary, leaving around Rs 23,286 crore to be absorbed by the new bidder.
A person in the know of the PIM details said an entity can put in bid for Air India on the "strength of its parent", which was not there before. A consortium can participate in the disinvestment process, provided each partner has at least 10 per cent stake as well as 10 per cent of the Rs 3,500 crore net worth requirement, according to the bid document. The lead member of a consortium should have at least 26 per cent stake. Individuals are allowed to bid as part of consortium.
The new owners of Air India will have to retain all the employees of the national carrier for at least one year post which they can offer a VRS. The gratuity, pension fund and post retirement medical benefits of existing and past employees too would be honoured by the new owner, civil aviation secretary Rajiv Bansal said. Tata Sons has emerged as the winning bidder for Air India with the government accepting its Rs 18,000 crore offer to acquire 100 per cent of the debt-laden state-run carrier.
The Delhi high court on Thursday dismissed BJP leader Subramanian Swamy's plea seeking to set aside the Air India divestment process on the allegation that the methodology adopted by the government in the valuation of the national carrier was "arbitrary, illegal and against public interest". The order was passed by a bench of Chief Justice D N Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh. The court said a detailed order will be uploaded. "Dr. Subramanian Swamy, sir we are dismissing this matter...," the bench said.
Apart from the Adani group, the Tata group, the Hinduja group, Indigo and a New York-based fund, Interups, are expected to submit EoIs.
Jet Airways, SpiceJet and Vistara also operated all women crew flights, though on their domestic network.
The government has initiated the process for inviting financial bids for the sale of national carrier Air India and the deal is likely to conclude by September, sources said. Salt-to-software conglomerate Tata Group was among the "multiple" entities that had put in preliminary bids for buying loss-making Air India in December last year. The sources said that after analysing the preliminary bids, eligible bidders were given access to the Virtual Data Room (VDR) of Air India, following which investors' queries were answered.
However, this restriction would not be applicable for international all-cargo operations and flights specifically approved by the DGCA.
Since Friday evening, 41-year-old Shemir, who works as a logistics manager in Dubai Silicon Oasis, has been making frantic phone calls to different trauma centres in Kerala near the Kozhikode airport to get information of his family members on board the flight.
Serving pilots question the Kozhikode plane crash report findings.
The government will transfer about Rs 16,000 crore of unpaid fuel bills and other pending dues that Air India owes to suppliers, to a special purpose vehicle before handing over the loss-making airline to the Tata Group, a senior official said. Air India Assets Holding Ltd (AIAHL), which will hold non-core assets of Air India such as land and building, will also be saddled with 75 per cent of the airline's debt that the Tata Group is not taking over. Besides the debt, the excess liability going to AIAHL comprises unpaid fuel bills to oil companies, airport operators and vendors, said Tuhin Kanta Pandey, Secretary to the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management - the department running the privatisation programme of the government.
The plane lost contact with air traffic control officials and landed in Mumbai after around four hours.
Air India Express has sacked an employee and ordered penal action against three others after a probe found them guilty of discrimination and favouritism against Delhi-based cabin crew during the last six months.
The acquisition will give the Tatas a firm footing on international routes and generate economies of scale.
Four Air India pilots have resigned and five have taken voluntary retirement while 10 pilots of Air India Express have left their job, seven last year and three this year, since January 2012, Minister of State for Civil Aviation K C Venugopal said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha.
The recent spate of technical glitches in aircraft has prompted the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to issue an order on July 18, making aircraft maintenance engineers (AMEs) with category B1/B2 licences the final authorities in certifying planes. This has put the spotlight on the availability of such personnel. According to the order, airlines were resorting to frequent one-off authorisation by the Category A certifying staff at transit stations, which is not in line with existing regulatory provisions.
Air India Express currently operates 145 daily flights, down from about 200 six months ago.
Tata Sons has emerged as the top bidder for the takeover of debt-laden State-run airline Air India but the bid is yet to be approved by a group of ministers headed by Home Minister Amit Shah, sources said.
"Financial bids for Air India disinvestment received by Transaction Adviser. Process now moves to concluding stage," DIPAM Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey tweeted.
Among the Indian carriers, Air India, Air India Express, IndiGo, and SpiceJet operate flights to Saudi Arabia while Saudi Arabian Airlines and Flynas are the two carriers operating in India.
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.
Travels to Gulf accounted for 40% of India's international air traffic in 2016.
'People in general have a kind of contemptuous attitude to those from Malappuram. But we have shown the entire world what dedicated and selfless work is.'
Air India pilot unions IPG and ICPA on Monday sought Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri's intervention on the wage cut issue and also requested for an "urgent" meeting with him on several other issues. "In our meetings in September, you had given us an assurance to look into our grievances positively. "While other airlines are rolling back the austerity pay cuts for their pilots, the wage cut for Air India pilots further increased from October.
He was focussed on his career and determined to join the prestigious National Defence Academy, located at Khadakwasla near Pune in Maharashtra, said some of his classmates from the Class 11 batch of St Vincent School.
Survivors of Air India Express passenger plane from Dubai that crashed outside the airport in Mangalore after overshooting the runway on Saturday, recounted their near death experience.
Air India on Monday said its subsidiary Air India Express' flight operations were in conformity with regulatory requirements and all its pilots and engineering staff are fully-qualified and trained to run operations in tune with international procedures.
The group began to outperform the broader market only with the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 while earlier it was largely keeping pace with the Sensex. The group's market cap is up 164.4 per cent since the end of March 2020 against a 105 per cent rally in the Sensex.
The EoI and the share purchase agreement would be issued in January itself for the bidders. While Air India's net loss in 2018-19 was around Rs 8,556 crore, its current total debt is around Rs 80,000 crore.
Ahead of two crucial audits, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has proposed to allow deputy director generals (DGs) and officers of Indian Air Force (IAF) to apply for the post of chief of India's aviation regulator. The current head of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), Arun Kumar, has been promoted as secretary and is expected to move out some time soon. DGCA has four Deputy DGs with experience in different fields of aviation.
She was originally scheduled to board the ill-fated Air India Express plane bound for Mangalore.
It was a double tragedy for a family in Kasargod district of Kerala which lost its Dubai-based son, who was on his way to attend his father's funeral, in the crash of the Air India Express flight in Mangalore. Siddique Sulaiman, a trading salesman, was on his way to attend his father's last rites in Kasargod and ended up boarding the fateful Air India Express flight to Mangalore.
"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.
Based on whether you choose the aviation, Bhopal or LIC numbers, and on the official death toll (in the absence of any other verifiable number), the value of human lives lost in the pandemic would range from Rs 16,500 crore to Rs 94,000 crore, explains T N Ninan.
