1 airline, 4 identities

RAVINDRA KUMAR
The Statesman, 14 October

Creating confusion about a brand that has been around for decades can only be subversive, and will only abet competitors.

WERE the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India to gaze at the tarmac of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport on one of these sepulchral autumn mornings, he would be utterly bewildered. He would see parked aircraft, supposedly of the same airline, wearing four different liveries – of the old Indian Airlines, of the Indian that emerged a year-and-a-half ago, of Air-India as it existed and of Air India as it is now, the latest a hybrid of the old Air-India and the new Indian liveries. And the CAG might well wonder if the Civil Aviation minister’s father-in-law runs a company that paints aircraft.

Were the CAG to step on board a domestic service of this merged entity, he would get to see one air-hostess wearing an orange sari, another a blue sari with a floral motif and a third wearing a plain blue sari. He would see safety information cards bearing the Indian logo, and Air India’s in-flight magazine called Swagat, which is not to be confused with Air India’s in-flight magazine called Namaskar, available on international services. (Until not so long ago, Indian had the dubious distinction of being possibly the only airline in the world to have two in-flight magazines!)

As he opens the magazine, he will find a message from the Chairman of Air India, which tells him that the two national carriers, Air India and Indian Airlines (not Indian, the CAG will note), have formally merged into the National Aviation Company of India Limited (NACIL). The CAG will be informed that new uniforms for Air India crew ~ designed by Pierre Cardin and Ritu Beri ~ will be in red, orange, black and white.

On the next page, however, the CAG would discover that even as it is now a merged entity, Air India continues to operate under two different designator codes, IC (for the erstwhile Indian), and AI (for the erstwhile Air-India). The article headlined “New Beginnings” will tell him that the information it contains “pertains to IC designated flights of Air India”. Indeed, as subsequent references will inform him, the domestic carrier is not actually called Air India, but “IC designated Air India”, which raises the horrible spectre of an airline being termed "AI designated Air India".

Were the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India to be true to his job, he would forthwith deploy all the resources at his command to find out how this half-witted (are we being kind to the half-wit?) arrangement came about? He would seek explanations from the Minister for Civil Aviation on 7 December 2005, the incumbent on 20 April 2006 (the day this ministry communicated its decision to merge the two airlines) and the present incumbent, and they are coincidentally the same person, how government policy and that of a state-owned airline could undergo such drastic change within the space of a few months and at such cost.

Was Government aware in December 2005, when Indian Airlines became Indian, that a new, merged entity was being contemplated? If there was even the slightest inkling of a merger, was it not criminally irresponsible of those in-charge (Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, the Civil Aviation secretary and the head of Indian Airlines) to have allowed the first makeover?

The directors’ report presented by Air-India with its accounts for the year ended 31 March 2006 has this to say: “The Ministry of Civil Aviation had communicated vide D.O. letter no. AV.18013/01/2006/AI dated 20 April 2006 that the proposal for merger of Air India and Indian Airlines had been under active consideration of the Government and it had been decided, in principle, to work towards such a merger (emphasis added).”

How active can “active consideration” be? Surely, such consideration when it involved two entities that together employ more than 35,000 people, would have been active for more than a few weeks? If so, the Civil Aviation ministry and especially its Minister must have been aware of the proposal under “active consideration” when they cleared the change from Indian Airlines to Indian and implemented it less than 20 weeks earlier? Indeed, hadn’t Mr. Patel himself broken a coconut on an aircraft’s nose to mark the identity change?

What did the first makeover cost? The new stationery, the new aircraft livery, the new boarding cards, the new airport publicity material? And, most important, the design fee, the overheads and the costs of re-orientation? Someone needs to ask Mr. Patel and his henchmen in the airline to detail every item of expense and to justify it. Perhaps Parliament should, but honest parliamentarians will be the first to admit theirs is not the most credible, and certainly not the most-hard working of national institutions.

Next, were the CAG to be true to his job, he would summon the Chairman and MD of Air India and ask him why two fashion designers (one of them an over-the-hill French couturier) are needed to design a sari, a garment whose shape and dimensions are fixed? He would ask Mr. V Thulasidas if it isn’t only names that he is dropping, when actually he has not a clue about sari design, and only a vague conception of the fact that his airline will be taken to the cleaners long before the new sari is?

Brand management isn’t about confusion; it is about clarity. But creating confusion about a brand that has been around for decades can only be subversive, and will only abet competitors. A succession of Civil Aviation ministers and public sector aviation bosses have shattered whatever illusions Air-India and Indian Airlines might have had about being market leaders, indeed of being service-providers.

But the confusion is palpable. The two airlines continue to operate separate web sites, continue to retain the old brands ~ Air India, Indian Airlines and Indian ~ and continue to emphasise their various identities. They have separate booking sites and a passenger, for instance, cannot book a seat on a Kolkata-Delhi-Tokyo connection, without transacting twice, on two web sites. Indeed, an attempt to book a Kolkata-Bangkok flight from Air India’s web site will generate the response that the airline does not operate such a service (whereas in fact IC-designated Air India, as opposed to AI-designated Air India, operates a daily flight on the route).

While Air-India’s loss of fame, and market share coincided with the tightening of controls on the airline, Indian Airlines began its slide with the opening up of home skies. Today, Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa link as many Indian cities with the world as Air-India does, if not more.

Indian Airlines surrendered its leadership within India to Jet Airways a long time ago. It is not even perceived as a serious domestic airline, except by a handful of loyalists and, of course, by Members of Parliament and senior bureaucrats. They choose the so-called national carrier essentially because they get free tickets and in part because they are likely to be accommodated at special check-in facilities, given seats of their choice even if they fetch up at the last minute (the first row in executive class is barred to paying passengers) and upgrades for family and friends.

Air-India’s accounts are subject to comments of the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India. The accounts for 2005-06 see the CAG make two brief comments ~ one about a reversal entry passed for license fees paid to Airports Authority of India in previous years and the other pertaining to non-disclosure of liability towards co-pilots for refund of training costs. Comments in earlier years, and about Air India’s subsidiaries are similarly desultory.

It is time some hard questions were answered, some accountability sought to be injected into the process of running state-owned airlines. And it should be done now when all the actors involved in the creation of this sordid mess ~ the Minister, the civil servants, and the chairpersons of the two airlines and of the merged entity ~ are on the scene. If Parliament does not do it, the CAG must.

(The writer is Editor, The Statesman)