The deepening crisis in Air India should be fully probed in the light of the report by the Parliamentary Committee on Public Undertakings (COPU) submitted to Parliament in March, and the recent CAG report.
Demanding this in a statement issued here on Saturday, Mr A.K. Padmanabhan, President, Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), criticised the Government's ‘eloquent silence' on the recent reports of aircraft acquisition by AI. He sought a CBI enquiry into aircraft acquisition.
He said the Comptroller and Auditor General's (CAG) report, as disclosed by the media, reaffirmed that AI's present financial crisis was because of the wilful acts of omission and commission by the then Civil Aviation Minister, Mr Praful Patel. The CAG report points out that the airline lost Rs 10,000 crore because it was forced into buying 111 aircraft that it did not need and the deal was done despite the fact that same would push Air India into a deeper financial crisis, he added.
The COPU report, too, had specifically recommended that reasons behind the ‘undue haste in merger' of IA and Indian Airlines and lack of monitoring after the merger should be probed. It had also recommended that the losses attributable to the merger should be recouped by the Government, as the decision to merge was spearheaded by the then Ministry-in-charge.
“Unless the culprits responsible for AI's present financial distress are brought to book, the provocative action by AI management to create industrial unrest under one pretext or the other would continue,” he added.