Good morning. Air India is notorious for their poor service. While the management has been promising an overhaul of the brand, the only significant improvement seems to be the (Manish Malhotra-designed) outfits that the cabin crew wear and its brand logo. What can the airline learn from aviator JRD Tata? Read on to know more. 

In other news, car sales aren’t picking up as they should have this festive season. Meanwhile, a pharma industry body calls out the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) report.

THE TAKE

What Air India Isn’t Learning From JRD Tata

Industrialist and aviator JRD Tata was known for his blue notes, summaries and observations when he flew Air India, the airline he founded in 1932. In 1951, he wrote in one such note that on an aircraft, VT-DAR en route to Europe and back, some of the seats reclined much more than the others. He suggested that all the seats be adjusted for a maximum reclining angle, except the rear seats limited by bulkheads.

In another note, he said the tea served on board from Geneva was, without exaggeration, indistinguishable in colour from coffee. “I do not know whether the black colour of the tea is due to the quality (of tea leaves) used or due to excessive brewing. I suggest that the Station Manager at Geneva be asked to look into the matter.”

Air India's journey in the next few decades is history book worthy. Air India ran accumulated losses of over Rs 70,000 crore and a debt of over Rs 60,000 crore when the airline was bought back by Tatas in January 2022 who were forced to sell it to the government in 1953.

A spate of recent viral videos and several social media outpourings about the cringe-worthy condition of Air India’s long-haul flights were a reminder that JRD Tata’s advice hadn’t been heeded at India’s national career. To be fair, Air India is furiously overhauling its aircraft and people, though it evidently faces challenges in both aspects.

Passengers say that the staff remain unhelpful or barely helpful and would rather wish away a problem and the person than resolve it. While this could be happening with other airlines too, there is no fair way to launch comparisons.

That there is a problem with Air India is clearer when it comes to the quality of interiors and inflight service. This is where JRD Tata would have surely stepped in. The abysmal condition of Air India flights was evident in a viral video posted by a passenger who paid over $6,000 for a one-way Delhi-Chicago first-class ticket. The interiors and seats were shabby and worn out, the inflight entertainment did not work and there was no wifi on this 15-hour flight. The passenger was apparently given a full refund. He was lucky. Many other passengers who have complained or borne this misery with silent grace have not sought for or got refunds.

Another passenger said she had to bear with a broken tray, reading lights continuously blinking and of course no entertainment system on a 16-hour flight from Mumbai to New York. “All this while Air India is charging the highest fare for this sector and charging for seats,” she said.

I had a similar experience though not first class on a JFK-Delhi flight on Air India two years ago where almost nothing worked and the seats groaned and protested. The cabin crew seemed to be mostly focussing their energies and smiles on a VIP on the flight. It is clear that some of these aircraft, particularly long haul, have been a problem for the Tatas for the past two years. I am assuming the previous management did not care.

Now, it would take a staggering amount of indifference and corporate blindness for the top brass to not have noted the state of the aircraft on their prime routes in their reviews or travels if they indeed chose to fly in their own airline as JRD Tata did. So the question is why did they not do anything about it?

The answers could be many. The most obvious is that demand in these sectors is so high that the airline would rather sell the seat at the highest price they are able to command. Of course a few passengers will turn out to be trigger-happy Instagrammers, but that is the price you can decide to pay. 

In the worst-case scenario, the airline offers refunds, and for the rest, it is likely an apologetic Twitter message, perhaps even with sad and regretful emojis thrown in. This is where Air India has been quite evidently dishonest.  

The airline could be clearly warning passengers on these sectors that their seats are a disaster and there is no inflight entertainment system worthy of speaking about or listening and service is a hit and miss. No airline will willingly do this.

But what it can do is offer at lower price points, especially for aircraft that are old and creaking, and provide as much comfort as a cramped bullock cart on an unpaved road. Many airlines including Emirates are offering unbundled business class fares where you pay less and get less: no lounge access, no chauffeur pickups and adjusted miles for instance. Air India could do that too for these aircraft. 

This is a software fix, not a hardware fix. Perhaps if Air India’s top brass took a leaf out of JRD Tata’s book and travel on their own aircraft for 15 hours incognito, they may change their minds.

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CORE NUMBER

2,77,000

This is the number of passenger vehicles sold so far in September as compared to 3,09,000 units in August as per the government’s Vahan portal. This isn’t a great number given that the festive season began this month with Ganesh Chaturthi. India’s festive season sees some of the highest sales in all categories. To woo buyers, luxury car makers such as Audi India, Mercedes-Benz India or BMW are offering everything from partial road tax waivers to better interest rates for EMIs, reported Business Standard. While this isn’t new, the report said that experts believe that luxury car sales are unlikely to hit the records they did last year. It isn’t just luxury car makers, other manufacturers such as Maruti Suzuki, Hyundai, Honda and others are also giving out incentives to build demand after a subdued beginning to the festive season. 

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FROM THE PERIPHERY

—💊 Days after the CDSCO said more than 50 drugs in India including paracetamols and others were not of standard quality, several drug manufacturers including Sun Pharma, Glenmark, Torrent Pharma and others have pointed out that products flagged in the report were spurious and different from what they were manufacturing. The Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, an industry body, also put out a statement saying the linking of counterfeit products to actual ones could have certain implications. IPA secretary general Sudarshan Jain was quoted by PTI as saying, “The outrageous linking of spurious products with legitimate manufacturers has severe reputational and financial impact. Moreover, this tarnishes India's reputation as a reliable supplier of medicines on a global stage.”

—🧯 A day after a fire broke out in the Tata Electronics factory in Tamil Nadu’s Hosur, reports suggest that Indian authorities are looking to launch a forensic probe. The factory makes components for Apple iPhones. Reuters reported fire department officials as saying that the fire began at a place where chemicals were stored. Officials said the factory was unlikely to go back to functioning on Monday. Two workers of the factory were hospitalised, and were discharged on Sunday. More details on what caused the fire are awaited. 

—🏭 There’s one more semiconductor chip manufacturer expected to come up in India. L&T Semiconductor Technologies CEO Sandeep Kumar has said that it will begin to manufacture semiconductor products in the next two years. The company is already working on building teams to manage different products and six product designs have already begun. This comes at a time when the Indian government has pushed for more manufacturing of semiconductor chips in India to reduce dependence on foreign companies. 

—💼 Raghuram Rajan, the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, believes that the government must concentrate on labour-intensive sectors to increase jobs in India. Lakhs of people turning up for government job openings shows that the situation isn’t that great. Rajan told news agency PTI, “It is not going well at the lower level. I think the desperate need is for jobs. And you can see this, forget the official statistics… You can see it in the number of applications for government jobs, which are overwhelming.”

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