Once in my childhood Maa (mother) slapped me for playing evil. I was sad and started looking towards stars. "I was one of those stars," so I believed. One of my cousin had died few days back and whenever I asked Mom, where she has gone. She uses to raise her finger towards a star. Loadstar…! 
How a 73 batch IIS officer has emerged as India's most powerful bureaucrat
I have been twice to the Finance Ministry. First in 2004 when I was still trained as a journalist and again in 2010 while assisting my boss for pre-budget interview with the Finance Minister. The secrecy was in the air as Babus were too busy with their files. “Dada” as Pranab Babu is lovingly called reached our interview set exactly on time, even before our anchor reached the spot. During the interview, I discovered a lady in her mid-fifties sitting among us, almost guiding finance minister on “what not to say.” We left the finance ministry in a huff after that as I have to rush with the tape to the studio. The lady slipped out of my mind.
After a week I spotted the same lady on TV screen standing authoritatively beside Pranab Da. It’s then when I asked my boss- Who’s she? With a grin on his face he replied –“aap nahi jante?”. She is Omita Paul. Paul, a Bengali surname, made me believe for a moment that she is better-half of our FM..! And that’s true, pardon my ignorance but that’s exactly the first thing which came to my mind.
Fast forward 2011, Economic Times published a story titled, “Why North Block can't do without Omita Paul.” The newspaper quoted Pranab Mukherjee saying to his officers, "Omita knows the way I want to express it." Pranab was informing his officers on how Paul was indispensable when it comes to writing his budget speech. Pranab’s comfort with Paul speaks volume about the kind of working chemistry Omita has with her boss. Her relation with Pranab Babu goes back to late 70s when this 1973 batch Indian Information Services officer was under secretary in the Commerce ministry and Pranab Babu was Finance Minister with additional charge of Ministry of Commerce and Supply. Omita was OSD in the Planning commission from June 91 to May 96. Not surprising it was the same time Pranab Babu was deputy chairman of the plan panel. Moving forward Pranab was Commerce minister from June 93 to Feb 95. Omita was OSD to the Commerce minister during the period. In 1995-96, Pranab Da was holding the External Affair portfolio, Omita was OSD to the Foreign Minister. Between 1996 and 2004 Congress was out of power and Omita was relegated to the Information services job. From the post of DPR in PIB to ADG in DD, Omita was left out of policy making process until a fine day in 2004, when NDA lost to UPA in the General election held that summer. Smiling Pranab Babu enters Defence Ministry on 23rd May 2004, and in November the same year Omita was assigned the duty to advise honorable Raksha Mantri. Omita was back with a bang. From OSD to Advisor of the Union minister, it was a huge promotion of sort. Pranab Da took her along to MEA and finally she landed in the Finance Ministry in May 2009.
“Madam,” as Omita is addressed by officers in NB - with love or with contempt- has carved out for herself an unprecedented space in the ministry. Though largely unknown to the aam taxpayers of this country some developments have brought into sharp focus the nature of Paul’s “overwhelming role” in the Finance Ministry. And slowly revolt is brewing against Omita Paul. Some officers are up in arms though still not openly but they are speaking up their minds in private conversations. They are questioning Paul’s expertise in managing micro financial niceties. Her qualification is under severe scrutiny. More than bureaucrats it’s the technocrats who are feeling “insulted” as FM puts aside their recommendations over Paul’s on many vital issues.
It is also interesting to note that how Omita Paul describes her role in the ministry. Talking to journalist in June this year she said, “It's a description of herself that Paul says she fails to recognise. " My job is to advise the FM and whenever I'm asked to work on something, I do it. My job is not different from any other bureaucrat ." Perhaps while describing her role Paul conveniently forgot to add that it was she who pressed Pranab Babu in taking back his resignation on the issue of Fin Min’s 2G note issue. And Pranab Babu obliged..! Can Ms Paul explain which other bureaucrat in the country has the guts to press the finance minister to take back his resignation?
Why was Bhave not given extension?
The exit of CB Bhave from SEBI also put the role of Omita Paul under scrutiny. Bhave is widely credited for improving the quality of operations and investigations at the market regulator. After completion of his three-year term Bhave was given extension for next two-year. But this decision was quickly rolled back and UK Sinha was made the new SEBI chief. Paul out rightly denied any role in Bhave’s affair. She said, "The suggestion that I or any bureaucrat can influence that is absurd. You are making me out to be more powerful than I really am. It would certainly not happen under this finance minister. He does not interfere in appointments or functioning of these institutions."
A PIL filed in November this year by a group of retired high-ranked government functionaries — including former CBI Joint Director BR Lall, former Chief of Air Staff S Krishnaswamy questioned the appointment of Sebi chief UK Sinha, and especially the creation of a selection panel that gave too much power to the finance ministry, and possibly done under the influence of corporate interests.
“There are clear indications that there is a nexus between the ministry of finance and major corporate players and that free and fair functioning of Sebi is no longer possible”, said former Solicitor-General Gopal Subramaniam, who represented the petitioners. The PIL said the denial of an extension to former SEBI chief CB Bhave was indicative of the ministry’s attempts to influence the market regulator. Among other things, Abraham said that Mukherjee’s office, and especially his advisor Omita Paul, were trying to influence many cases before Sebi, including those relating to Sahara Group, Reliance, Bank of Rajasthan and MCX.
Why income –tax exemption for members of UPSC?
Former Delhi Police commissioner and husband of Omita Paul, KK Paul is a member of UPSC. In the 2011 budget proposals Mukherjee granted income-tax exemption on certain allowance to members of UPSC. As a result, UPSC members came to enjoy an exemption hitherto reserved for posts such as the chief election commissioner and judges of the Supreme Court. As usual Paul said she has nothing to do with this. "There was no file on that which I would have seen. I have nothing to do with it." "I'm amused even by the suggestion that I need to be involved in something like this. UPSC is a constitutional authority.
I had a cursory glance at her Biodata and on record she doesn’t have any experience or formal education to be the advisor to the Finance Minister. Paul is M.Sc in Chemistry from Punjab University. She did her Bachelors in journalism (and possibly this degree would have helped her in getting her IIS job). She has also attained Advanced professional programme in public administration at IIPM, New Delhi (This is also a must for every bureaucrat in the country). Interestingly her qualifications also include ILO symposium on information technologies in the Media and Entertainment Industries. ..! Her CV credits her with editing books including Work Culture in India and Executive Motivation and Human Resource Planning in Airlines –an Asian Experience. Do these qualifications qualify anyone to hold sensitive and important post like advisor to the Finance Minister of largest democracy?
No one would have questioned the credibility of advisor to the FM if finances of this country would have been managed well. But looking at the mess country’s finance are in, some questions naturally arises as to who is advising our Finance Minister?
Note: Sourced from Philosopher’s Beard
Once upon a time religion was in the world and made the world. Religion made the messy chaotic world legible to human understanding and amenable to human purposes. It fixed things in place, like the stars in the sky and the distinction between men and women. It ordered the flux into the cycle of life: the turning of the sun, seasons, and harvests; birth and death. It explained and justified the social order: why one man is born to wealth and power and another to be a serf. It told us with all the force of a mighty and all-encompassing metaphysics what our lives really meant, and how we should act, think and feel. But no more. Religion has been brought low by its old enemies, philosophy and politics. Religion persists and is even popular. But it is now in the mind, a matter of personal belief projected outwards. In short, religion is now secular.
I focus here on the trajectory of the Abrahamic style of theological religion (other forms of religiousish behaviour require their own accounts). This kind of religion rests on a metaphysical unification of the divine, the social-order, and nature. It gives us an enchanted world and a guarantee that we know our true place in it. The enemies of theological religion have always been philosophy and politics because both present inherently secular ways of grappling with the nature of the world that bypass religion. Their rise has shattered both enchantment and Truth. Religion still creeps about the place, but in a thoroughly subordinate role.
Philosophy is always trying to see the world - natural, social, and ethical - from a non-orthodox perspective. Philosophers are those annoying people who are always saying, Yes, but..... As in Yes of course God exists, but just suppose that the heavens are like a giant clockwork mechanism that goes automatically after it's been set up? Wouldn't that be an interesting way of looking at things?
Religions can be seen as rich communal storehouses of knowledge about subjects as diverse as ethics, agriculture, hygiene, economics, etc that provide access to more wisdom about how to live than any one person could ever come to on their own. (That is a significant reason for its attractiveness even in the modern world, apart from the social club benefits.) But its metaphysical constraints (the ultimate answer is always that God did it) mean that religion can't compete with philosophy in the theoretical knowledge game.
Philosophy constantly spews out alternative approaches to understanding the world, most perniciously by creating dedicated collaborative epistemic communities interested in particular subjects - previously. (Every major academic discipline, from physics to economics to mathematics was started by philosophers.) These lovers of theoretical knowledge for its own sake leave the speculative orientation of philosophy behind as they develop specialist methodologies and employ them systematically upon different bits of the world. If they are given space and freedom (universities) they generate vast quantities of robust theoretical knowledge about how the world really works. Religion of course knows this full well, and always strove to keep the keys to knowledge to itself, for example in medieval Europe by exercising tight control over literacy, libraries, and universities.
But the Enlightenment let philosophy out of its bottle for good, and since then it has succeeded to an astonishing degree in producing much much better accounts of how the world works than any religion. It has convincingly shown that all religions make serious mistakes about matters of fact (astronomy, history, medicine, etc), and about how facts are connected (evolution, cosmology, etc). The sacred triangle between the divine, human society and nature just isn't out there, so, obviously, your prayers cannot affect the weather or your marriage prospects. It has shown that the world is actually much more complicated than religion ever claimed - exposing the limits of religious knowledge communities. But at the same time it has shown that the world doesn't need God, gods, or spirits to make it work. Even in ethics, it has shown up the inconsistencies, biases, and questionable foundations of religious teachings and identified a plethora of alternatives that beat iron age patriarchal tribal mores hands down. (How many genocides does God order in the Old Testament? Death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath?) Religion can cope with atheism since atheists at least take religion seriously enough to argue about. Naturalists though don't even find religion compelling enough to consider (any more than fairies or UFOs), except as an object of study, for example by anthropologists and sociologists.
Politics is about earthly power and has an underlying Machiavellian pragmatism that has always been in tension with religious accounts of the divine, true, social order. Politicians are the ones who have bright ideas like this. Hey, what if I stop killing and torturing the people who disagree with the official church about the Doctrine of the Trinity. Think of all the money I would save and all the extra taxes I could raise.
The pragmatism of politics is a threat to theological domination of society in more than one way. (Hence the truism that the separation of church and state actually protects religion.) On the one hand religion can easily be corrupted by politics if it is seduced by the possibility of using direct earthly power to make sure the social world follows the divine script properly. The exercise of that power can't be done without yielding to the logic of politics and becoming embroiled in the profane arts of government (like the Borgias, or Khamenei). And then people will stop taking the clerics' heavenly status claims seriously. On the other hand politics can reach out to religion as a source of legitimacy for its own Machiavellian strategies - blessing kings, wars, and taxes for example. Here the seductions themselves are earthly - access to the king's court, monetary rewards, and legal privileges for your clerics. Sooner or later you're selling indulgences to build gorgeous palaces and your clerics are raping peasant children with impunity. And then, again, the people tend to lose faith.
Despite these tensions, politics and religion can co-exist in a reasonably stable arms-length relationship since each recognises that it needs what the other does and can't replace the other (churches need funding; kings need right as well as might). So even when the relationship broke down (e.g. in the Protestant Reformation), it tended to come back. That is, until politics invented something new and enormously powerful: large nation states combined with democratic government. These replace kings, whose legitimacy as rulers was always based on a dubious metaphysics of divine social order (backed by raw ruthless power), with professional politicians. The legitimacy of political power holders now depends on their ability to appeal to the people, not the clerics; the legitimacy of their actions depends on their adherence to temporal constitutions not divine law.
Since these forces were fully unleashed religion has been forced to adapt. Out went the mighty all-encompassing metaphysics in the face of the top-down scrutiny of querulous university academics. Out went the claim to absolute truth in the face of the bottom-up revolution of peasants wanting the right to their own opinion. The new religion is individualised, marketised, and deracinated.
Individualisation
Liberal democracy is all about dealing with the fact of reasonable disagreement, that as soon as one relaxes totalitarian social control one will find that other people have completely sincere beliefs and judgements that differ from yours. Luther of course when he said 'Here I stand. I can do no other.' didn't think he was making a plea for individual freedom of conscience. He thought he was right. But when lots of people start thinking they have the right to stand up for what they believe, one has to find a modus vivendi (or face interminable civil war). One has to find a way to live in the same political society as people whom you believe are utterly - metaphysically - wrong. The trouble is that once you set up some rules for keeping the peace - state neutrality on religious matters, no religion in the public square, etc - they do much more than keep the peace. One ends up finding one's Lutheran, Catholic or Jewish neighbours actually very pleasant. It becomes harder and harder to remember that the really important thing in your relationship is that they're going to hell. Politeness comes to matter to you and you decide to keep your revelation to yourself so as not to be an ass. Instead of religious credos being too dangerous to utter in public, mentioning them becomes something of a social gaffe, like blurting out your taste in pornography.
Meanwhile the damned philosophers are busy creating a secular intellectual space open to all and independent of any religious dogma. Religion's storehouse of wisdom is bypassed and then surpassed by towering cathedrals of secular knowledge. Then it is subjected to criticism. Of its science, history, ethics; even of its literary status! If you try to talk about miracles and divine providence these people ask if you also believe in UFOs or fairies; and ethnographers ask if they can study your interesting sub-culture.
Contemporary religion takes place in the mind of the individual. Beyond this inner world you must act as if your beliefs were irrelevant. Outside, the world turns according to a godless physics, biology, economics, etc. In society your talk and actions are dominated by the fact of pluralism, so you must behave with a careful neutrality that the godless can go along with.
Marketisation
Pluralism and individualisation also brings markets. Of course, marketing is nothing new to the theological religions, but previously they were often in the comfortable state of being monopolies and being able to charge above the going rate in your attention and property for their spiritual services. That meant that they tended to set a 'price' for their services that maximised their profits, even though it left a great many people unserved or underserved (the deadweight loss of monopoly). Indeed in the heyday of religion most people probably weren't particularly religious because they weren't the core market and the core product wasn't designed or priced with them in mind.
Nevertheless there was some innovation. The invention of the afterlife for example is a brilliant way of getting even more out of your present customers. As Pascal pointed out, by extending people's utility function into eternity you alter their cost-benefit analysis in favour of greater commitment to the church in this life (however much you discount future well-being, eternity trumps present consumption). Likewise monotheism's visceral distaste for polytheism is typical monopolist protectionist behaviour (3/10 commandments are about monopoly and trademark protection). If you have a choice of gods you can play them off against each other, as the Greeks did, by switching to a different god whenever one fails to deliver. Multiple gods means market competition between divine service providers and lower prices for the ordinary consumer (and so also more freedom to think for yourself). Under monotheism when your prayers aren't answered, it's your fault and you need to pay/pray more.
Monopolist religions used their excess profits to invest in R&D (among other things) in their principal technology - theology. On the one hand they were able to train and employ the best minds of their time. On the other hand this was quite inefficient for society as a whole since all those great minds were only allowed to think about one area. And it turns out that when great minds take up the serious study of God, they raise at least as many problems as they solve (which then have to be kept quiet - Luther!).
The modern state of affairs requires religions to compete with each other like regular companies in a free market. Monopoly profits from captive consumers are a thing of the past. Since people tend to think all religion is pretty much the same thing (different paths to the same ultimate truth) all the religious denominations are desperate to avoid being fully commoditised, like pork bellies, as fully substitutable with each other and compared purely on price. So they strive to differentiate themselves, like supermarkets or airlines. They identify and target distinct types of customers like single mothers, high-flying business types, or specific ethnic groups, and then woo them with free lunches, parking, daycare, and sermons they like to hear. To increase retention rates they pay close attention to customer feedback and tweak their offerings to meet changing tastes. (Latin isn't working for us anymore.) They have to come up with competition strategies against new start-up religions and franchise operators moving into their areas.
All this marketing is of course quite profane. The success of a religion is now judged in terms of the numbers of 'bums on seats' it can corral into its services, and the amount of money those bums can be persuaded to give up. Not by the truth of its theology. The True religion is all mixed up in the marketplace with the mass of heresies and trivial spiritualisms (like horoscopes and crystal-ball gazing), which are distinguishable only by the success of their marketing. And the marketing affects the content of religions as well, turning them into a set of recognisable hack genres like self-help and personal-growth, or horror (fire and brimstone; that one with the snakes). Many of the fastest growing religions hardly bother with theology at all, because their customers don't have time for all that wordy stuff.
One of the interesting consequences of this is that modern religion has diversified its offerings to supply every consumer niche, rather than demanding that the spiritually inclined accommodate themselves to the True church. Tastes which went somewhat unrecognised and uncatered to before are now met by specialist operators. For example, fundamentalists eschew the established religious providers altogether and start their own co-operatives to meet their peculiar concerns with purity. So in some countries with a thriving free market for religion (most prominently, America) there is probably more religious activity than ever before.
Deracination
Contemporary religion has been deracinated - separated from its cultural context. In the enchanted world religion was always felt as much as thought, because it was literally embedded into the social landscape and rituals of everyday life. That gave religion a solid foundation, and helped make defection difficult to even imagine. It also protected religion from theological excesses by requiring a religion that a human society could actually live by. But now that the enchanted world has shattered, theology can no longer depend on the solid foundations of social practices. Almost the whole of Western Europe, for example, enjoys its quaint Christian culture (history, holidays, recipes, nice old buildings, church weddings) as part of its national identity, but hasn't the faintest interest in Christianity. We are basically Christian naturalists, perhaps the ultimate insult to the old-time religion. Religion for us is an ethnic identity thing, not a belief thing.
On the other hand, the falling away of the cultural roots of religion means that those people interested in personal spirituality have more freedom than ever to download and try out a new theology. That drives the thriving market for religion already discussed. But it also has implications for the kind of religion that people can have. In particular accessing the wisdom of religion about the human condition (all those brilliant minds focussed on analysis and commentary for generations) requires more than reading the sacred book by itself (or in the case of many evangelicals, the few quotations they like). The reason many fundamentalists are so unpleasantly and rigidly righteous is that they are people of the book who lack the lived culture of the book. They mistake religious knowledge of the kind one can get by reading a book like Euclid's geometry, for religious wisdom, which requires a much deeper immersion and personal subordination to the culture of that religion. Fundamentalists, and their worried observers, make an even bigger mistake in believing that religious movements based on literalist readings of sacred texts constitute a revival of old-time religion. Instead they are a fundamentally modern and secular phenomena of individuals searching for meaning in their own lives and fitting together a personal theology from bits and pieces of texts that suit them, and then joining clubs that see things the same way.
Conclusion
The secularisation thesis actually happened, though not exactly in the way 20th century sociologists predicted. They thought levels of religiousity would decline as religion lost its hegemonic dominance over society, whereas in fact it is the nature of religiousity which has changed. Contemporary religion is a thoroughly secular affair. It is matter of individual conscience, and as such hard to distinguish from secular 'religions' like veganism, environmentalism, or socialism. Religious individuals, like socialists, see the world a certain way, but they recognise that others see it differently and they understand the significance and legitimacy of religion in terms of private personal belief. The deinstitutionalisation of religion in liberal societies has led to cut-throat competition which has shifted religions from price-makers to price-takers. Religions now recognise that the customer is always right and make offerings to the customer (instead of vice versa). Religion has been cut free from its cultural base and now floats freely, as bite-size memes that anyone can download from the cloud when they feel like it and assemble for themselves.
This is absolutely crazy! Indian newspapers have largely ignored this bizarre spectacle for some reason. In a country where bureaucracy has its own customs, having a mascot meet a minister is unheard of.
Greenpeace activists, some dressed as tigers, demonstrated outside the central headquarters of the Ministry of Coal in central Delhi on Wednesday, until Minister Prakash Jaiswal agreed to see them. Greenpeace has been protesting India’s coal policy, citing damage to forests in central India.
After about an hour of demonstrations outside the ministry’s headquarters, the group was invited into the minister’s office, a spokeswoman said, where they presented him with petitions signed by 112,000 people asking for changes in India’s coal policy. Minister Jaiswal has asked the group to come back for a longer meeting next week, the spokeswoman said.
In particular, Greenpeace has been investigating the impact coal mining is having on Maharashtra’s Chandrapur region, near the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve. The forests outside the reserve are shrinking because of mining and industrialization, a Greenpeace report says, which is impacting the reserve animal population, who use the forests as a corridor to travel to other reserves.
The amount of coal India produces fell far short of government plans in the last fiscal year, a fact the ministry blames in part on the difficulty of getting the necessary environmental clearances to mine.
It was month of April, 2004. April 7, 2004 precisely. "I am that mysterious buyer," roared Vijay Mallya at a press conference in Bangalore as he unveiled the legendry Tipu Sultan’s sword taken away after the British assault on Srirangapatnam on May 4, 1799 which saw the end of the 'Tiger of Mysore.' “Oh..he made the country proud by getting back the sword”, mumbled my father. Perhaps Dad himself has never before heard the name of this “savior of our national honor.” And rest they say is history. Vijay Mallya’s arrival on the national conscience was grand and grander were the ways in which he ruled the national imagination for seven-years.
Postscript: "To write the epitaph of Kingfisher airlines constantly is not fair," Vijay Mallaya told reporters on November 15, 2011. So, what actually happened between April 2004 and November 2011?
Mallya’s rise incidentally coincided with India’s own rise as an economic super power. With one of the world's most expensive yachts and a cricket and Formula-1 team, Mallya soon became "King of the Good Times" for his zooming lifestyle. Mallaya symbolizes the resurgent India. For Indian middle class, he was what everyone wanted to be. He was the emblem of new India - flashy, high-risk, rich, flaunting and never ashamed of it.
Worth $1.1 billion, according to Forbes magazine, Mallya’s lifestyle fascinated many Indians, including the nearly 700,000 that follow him on Twitter. But now India’s “Richard Branson” is in deep trouble. Mallya’s business interest includes liquor, IPL and F1 teams. But it was his aviation dream that perhaps made him a power in business world to reckon with. His Kingfisher Airlines, accounts for nearly one-fifth of flights in the Indian sky at any given point in time. He literally transformed the flying experience by focusing on services like good food, personal screens on domestic flights. On each flight, Mallya appears on a recorded message on the inflight entertainment system, boasting of hand-picking each of the airline's hostesses who "have been instructed to treat you in the same way as if you were a guest in my own home", writes Reuters. Mallya’s innovation touched the flyers and the company was doing brisk business so much so that last year the company even applied for flying in international skies.
And now board members of Kingfisher airlines are considering a sale of property to raise funds for the airline. The airline has cancelled more than 200 flights in the past week, raising fears it could go bankrupt. I enquired with one of journalist friend as to what ail Kingfisher? She promptly blamed it on the “extravagant and pompous life-style,” of Vijay Mallya. And this sentiment is shared by many others including Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray. "Mallya's flamboyant lifestyle is responsible for the debts that Kingfisher Airlines has incurred," Bal Thackeray said.
Type Vijay Mallaya on the Google and the first suggestion it prompts is “Vijay Mallaya’s car collection, his yacht, and his house.” So did Mallaya flounder all his wealth which he earned from Kingfisher? By all indication it seems so…! He flies around the world, take our MPs on his personal plane for cricket matches across the globe, dines with global celebrities which includes soccer stars, F -1 drivers, Hollywood stars and not to say voluptuous models. His 312-foot yacht, the Indian Empress cost almost $89 million. Mallya also owns a Scottish whisky company. News reports suggest that he “once personally flew in his private jet from New Zealand to Scotland with three bottle of whisky found left from British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1907 Antarctic expedition.” His vintage cars have envied the rich and the famous. And not the last, the most waited calendars of the year- The Kingfisher calendar. Often appearing flanked by almost nude models in photoshoots, Mallaya almost barred himself in family homes.
Mallaya in a live televised press conference on Tuesday blamed high fuel costs, fierce price war between a handful of airlines for all the ills. He has also sought soft loan from the government. But the sentiments against any financial help are very high. Main opposition party BJP has vociferously opposed any such move by the government. The All India Bank Employees' Association has also voiced its sentiment against the bailout. Rahul Bajaj is more critical of the issue. He said, “Those who die must die."
It’s very strange to see Kingfisher in red despite the fact that civil aviation industry has seen passenger growth rate of 20 per cent this year. Good pitchers, as Don Cooper once said, after a tough outing, bounce back. Real good pitchers don't let too many poor games get in there. Hope Vijay Malaya will take this crisis as a lesson and will walk with a little more caution in times to come. Kingfisher’s failure will do irreparable damage to India’s growth story. Market runs on sentiment and India can’t afford to fail Kingfisher as it will lead to a huge perception crisis. Let’s wait and watch.
And for the government there are issues which need to be regulated in order to keep the aviation sector in good health. Fuel costs are high internationally, so government can’t do much and certainly cheap money and not cheap fuel is the biggest hindrance. The FDI limit is 49 %, but intriguingly it bars foreign airlines to invest in domestic sector, a regulation which is flawed and at worst demoralising. Secondly its high-time government should privatise Air India. When one player in the industry can use taxpayers’ money to stay afloat and keep fares low, the rest of the industry will have to compete on its terms. A weak Air India will keep the rest of the industry weak, too. And lastly our airports need investment and upgradation. Barring Delhi & Mumbai most Indian airports are run on public money. Privatise airports as well. This will increase competition even among airports.
Is he most under applauded batsman India has ever seen? Below are a few facts - 