Take a vote on all the candidates in government that are ripe to be bid a firm and none too polite farewell. The civil aviation ministry should rank high in any voter sample. Prime among the reasons why this monster is so unloved is how utterly out of sync it is with the times and how brazenly and tirelessly it has worked to preserve the most entrenched vested interests. Name a wrong cause and the civil aviation ministry has made it its own. Take the biggest national symbols of public sector sloth, inefficiency, bad service, bad security and safety - you name it - and it turns out that the civil aviation ministry has presided over it. Take the string of ministers that have graced this ministry - Ananth Kumar and Sharad Yadav are only the two latest in a string of illustrious luminaries - and you will find they represent everything that is most reprehensible in Indian politics.But most outstandingly, for this correspondent, the reason why this ministry should win the `irrelevant and egregious' contest hands down is its brazen, shameless and astoundingly successful manipulation of foreign investment norms in the aviation sector.
To this ministry, offer the credit for the frankly hilarious idea that all manner of foreign investors are welcome to come and invest in Indian airlines except, of course, foreign airlines. This with a nonchalance that suggests that nothing could be more natural than just such a rule! Talk of standing conventional wisdom on its head: here we were all wasting our time growing up to think that there things like synergies in investments that made companies in an area particularly suited to invest in other companies in the same area. Talk of boldness and orginality. It has it all.
It also has the fine talent of driving private business to tears. This, we have to concede is not a talent in short supply in government, but the fine art that it has been made into by the civil aviation ministry qualifies it for the highest marks here as well.
Strain your memory to hark back to the little matter of the Tata-Singapore airlines joint venture. The Tatas were harassed with such exquisite sadism that they were forced to come out and say in frustration that they would not be pursuing the matter any further for their failure to get the government interested.
Of course we shall ignore the little matter of a private airline - mum's the word - whose interests always seem to curiously interest India's civil aviation ministers. To the point that the policies of the civil aviation ministry have followed a trajectory that would seem strangely to coincide with these interests. How very odd.
The civil aviation sector is one of the least liberalised worldwide. The matter of opening up this sector is a bone of contention between the US and the EU. But at least a refusal to open up there has been driven by what is perceived to be in the national interest, even though it may be a misguided notion of what is in the national interest. In India it is a different story altogether. The poor public sector airlines have been astoundingly abused by successive ministers by being named as the reason why they follow illiberal and wrong-headed policies. Not that the airlines are angelic, but they do end up taking the flak for things that are not always their fault.
The real object of successive civil aviation ministers' affection has been something else,. The only constant in this sordid story i s the real sufferers from their actions: consumers. That at least is a constant: poor consumers.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.