The Descent of Air India

Title: The Descent of Air India

Author: Jitender Bhargava

Publisher: Bloomsbury India 2013 (First)

ISBN: 9789382951131

Pages: 271

Air India is India’s state-owned airline. It was founded by the legendary JRD Tata as a private company, and later nationalized by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Even though ownership changed hands, Tata was allowed to continue at the helm till early 1970. After his exit, people of lesser caliber and bureaucrats administered the company into ruinous depths. As of now, the company faces an existential problem. Losses had mounted, net worth of the company had eroded, the highly paid, low productivity staff who are organized in militant unions and the government’s policy of opening up the skies to Indian and foreign airlines have all contributed to the decline of India’s premier airline which once boasted “when in the air, Air India is the best”. This book tells the story of when and where the rot began and how the company landed up in the trap in which it finds itself today. The author, Jitender Bhargava, is a former executive director of Air India who had worked in its various departments including HR and In-flight Services. This varied experience has helped the author analyze issues that spreads over several functions of the company. What Bhargava portrays in the narrative is presciently applicable to any government-owned company in India. If you replace the name Air India with any other PSU in India, the remaining part of the story will be the same – militant labour unions, weak management, low productivity, political meddling and excess staff. Every executive in the Indian public sector should read this book in order not to repeat the same mistakes. Quite unlike books of the same genre reviewed earlier in this blog like The Maruti Story, Inside Apple, The Real Thing and The GoogleStory, this book tells the tale of a failed company.

A clear picture of excessive intervention of trade unions in management is provided in the book with several shocking examples. Unions interfered in routine functioning of the airline, capitalizing on the vulnerability of a weak management. Instead of standing firm, the administration’s orders often proved to be farcical. When Air India introduced Johnnie Walker Blue Label whiskey for its business class passengers, the cabin crew began pilfering. Many passengers complained that they were not served the premium brand. The toothless management didn’t have the gumption to take action against the erring employees. Instead, they decided to withdraw the scheme of serving whiskey altogether! While the author admits that some amount of pilferage takes place in every airline, in Air India it assumes the dimensions of theft or robbery. We get an idea of the amount of theft of liquor after the management decided to perform security checks on the cabin crew at Bangkok Airport. Several personnel were caught red-handed while trying to sneak out with liquor cans concealed in their baggage. All those caught in this exercise were suspended from service. Bhargava ascertains that consumption of alcohol in the planes dropped by 75 – 80% as a result. Unions opposed even change of crockery in newly introduced aircraft. They wanted to have a say in the day to day functioning of the company and even possessed an office in the company’s head quarters building. Union leaders obtained all allowances given to the flying staff, without being airborne even for a moment.

Air India’s management gets a thorough dressing down that runs through several chapters of the book. The company’s board is picturized as a puppet body that dances to the tune of the politicians who rule the ministry of civil aviation. Sometimes, the Chairman and Managing Director also will be a political appointee, who maintains a servile posture to the minister as long as the official lasts in the chair, which was usually not very long. At a time, Air India had 13 chairmen in 20 years! The subservience to political interests reached its nadir when the company’s head office was shifted to Delhi from Mumbai. This was done in a bid to ensure proper liaison with the ministry, but shifting of the decision-making panel from the commercial hub of the country adversely affected the functioning. Promotions took place only on the basis of seniority. One person reached a post of higher responsibility only when he had only a few months to retire from service. Bhargava notes that the only exception to the rule happened when the CEO decided to promote his chronies. The author identifies three stages in the airline’s management. The first was a period of professional leadership under JRD Tata as the Chairman, which lasted up to early 1970s. Then came the second era that ended in the 2000s when the top echelons simply watched as the company began disintegrating right before their eyes, but didn’t lift a finger to stem the rot. And the last stage continues still, in which the company is going under. Acquisition of a large fleet of new aircraft when the airline was already in deep losses was a decision that smacks of managerial incompetence.

Even though the author has minutely examined the issues haunting Air India with inside knowledge, readers get a feeling that Bhargava makes his smart analysis with the benefit of hindsight and cherry-picking the examples. The author himself served in the airline in the capacity of an executive director and can’t escape from a part of the blame that is collectively put on the management’s head. Reading his tirades against V Thulasidas and Praful Patel, who were the managing director and minister of civil aviation respectively, one is led to think that personal vendetta might also be a factor behind the barrage of accusations as he was unceremoniously removed the HR department. If the author is to be believed, the duo was behind the downfall of the organization. He also slips in subtle hints that large scale corruption had taken place under Thulasidas’ stewardship of Air India. However, the author has played safe without attracting libel. Bhargava criticizes everything the management did, but didn’t have any concrete proposals to offer at the time when he himself served in the management in a top position. Unfortunately in India, public sector is where everyone, including the CEO, criticizes the management for their own mistakes! He failed to put forward any schemes that could be cited as alternatives. The airline began its free fall when the country was opened up for liberalization and the desi corporates were feeling the heat. But this failed to wake up Air India. The airline’s profitability was lost to competition from low-cost, private airlines. Apart from avoiding some flawed decisions like the mega purchase of aircraft, nobody could have saved the public sector undertaking from its eventual ruin. The author pretends to have some original ideas, but fail to display any! The book identifies the tasks set before Air India if it wants to be in the field in future. The first and foremost priority is to obtain the services of an able leader who is not fettered by the whims and fancies of the politicians and also not blackmailed by the labour unions.

The book is written with great earnestness but the readability is mediocre. The layout of the page with unusually long spacing between paragraphs gives the appearance of a pamphlet in which the paragraphs stand out like articles in a constitution, at the cost of seeming like discontinuous ideas. The book is painfully in need of an index to help the reader look up the persons and episodes narrated, in an easy way. In addition to these, readability suffers when the author resorts to verbatim reproductions of reports, suggestions made by him, statistical figures with dates and the like. We see many numbered and bulleted lists in the text, which may increase the effectiveness of a business proposal but a discouragement to the general reader.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 2 Star