As my final post for the month of July, I reproduce a touching example of the revolutionary change occurring within the aviation sector in India. Indian Airlines is 100% government owned, and has mended its ways thanks to the competition from private sector airlines. A similar revolution has already occurred at the state owned BSNL, who is competing head on with the private telecom providers, and all the state owned banks, who are competing with their private counterparts.

It is time the mandarins at Rajiv Gandhi Bhavan free NACIL (Air India and Indian Airlines) and the Airport Authority of India from their clutches. They will compete and effectively.

Devesh
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A quiet revolution in service delivery ?
31 Jul, 2008,
Arvind Panagariya,

The events preceding the recent trust vote in the Parliament — the chanting, the shouting, the waving of wads of cash, and the display of total contempt for the country’s highest office expressed in the hissing and heckling that forced the prime minister to table rather than deliver his speech — point to virtual chaos in governance. Daily reports of rapidly deteriorating law and order situation in our major cities reinforce this picture.

Yet, within the complex democracy that is India, this image masks some dramatic improvements under way. The entry of multiple private-sector players into areas that were previously monopolised or dominated by the government is bringing a quiet revolution in service delivery.

Traditionally, Indians seeking service have approached the man behind the desk with great apprehension: Should they plead with him? Should they consider bribing him? Perhaps an aggressive approach involving a physical threat would do the trick? Or may be they should find a “connection” to bring pressure from the top?

But thanks to freer private-sector entry, this tyranny of the man behind the desk is beginning to give way to a culture of service with smile. This realisation came to me during a recent visit to India that involved a lecture tour in four cities in as many days.

My first two stops — Hyderabad and Bangalore — brought me to dazzling new airports built to international standards. I had read much about the woes of the journey between each of these airports and the city they served. But less than one hour between Rajiv Gandhi International Airport and the heart of Hyderabad and approximately one hour and fifteen minutes between Bengaluru International Airport and the city centre of Bangalore seemed no worse to me than the time taken going from the JFK Airport to Manhattan or from Narita Airport to Tokyo.

My third stop was Chennai, which too was smooth. But my luck seemed to turn for the worse as I began my journey to Jaipur via Mumbai. Upon arrival at Chennai airport, I learned that my Jet Air flight to Mumbai had been discontinued a week earlier. With no contact number at hand, the airline had been unable to inform me of the change.

So I suddenly found myself at the mercy of the “man behind the (Jet Air) desk.” But much to my surprise and comfort, he booked me on an Indian Airlines flight that would bring me to Mumbai well in time to make the connection to my Jet Air flight to Jaipur. He got me the Indian Airlines boarding pass and also issued the boarding pass for Jet Air flight from Mumbai to Jaipur. All I had to do was wait.

As luck would have it, the Indian Airlines flight also got delayed. By the time I arrived in Mumbai, I was left with only 35 minutes to catch the flight to Jaipur. It looked hopeless: my checked bag was yet to come and I also needed to transfer from Terminal 1A to Terminal 1B. In desperation, I caught hold of the first ground staff I could spot. He turned out to be from Kingfisher.

The young man nevertheless walked me to the nearest Indian Airlines office. That office was meant to deal with lost baggage and not flight connections. Yet, the woman in charge immediately called Jet Air to alert them that I was on my way. Sadly, Jet Air responded in the negative: I was too late to make the connection.

But the woman urged me to pick up my luggage and rush to Terminal 1B anyway since flights can experience last minute delay. Thanks to the efficiency of luggage handlers at the airport, by the time I walked back to the luggage area, my bag had arrived. I loaded it on a cart and rushed to Terminal 1B. With multiple counters open, I could walk straight to one of them and display the boarding pass issued in Chennai. “The woman behind the desk” immediately called the staff at the gate and successfully persuaded it to let me in. Alongside, she had me run and get the luggage scanned, checked it in and asked an employee to rush me through the security and thence to the gate. To my sheer pleasure, I (and my luggage) arrived in Jaipur as planned.

It is unlikely that this episode could have occurred in the pre-liberalisation era. The happy outcome required swift movement of luggage from the plane to the arrival area and assistance of employees of an airline and a department that had no direct responsibility to me.

Sceptics would undoubtedly say that this episode relates to an industry in which only the well off benefit, with the common man continuing to suffer the same old fate. There are three responses to this argument. First, the process of improved service delivery must begin somewhere. We should not let the best be the enemy of good.

Second, ordinary folks are not as untouched from the pleasures of superior delivery as sceptics would have us believe. In Jaipur, my brother-in-law, a middle-class Indian, could scarcely stop talking about the excellent service he was experiencing at a new private-sector bank. In turn, his wife had stories of great service combined with low prices of fruits and vegetables at a recently opened supermarket. To these, I may add the dramatic benefits of improved and expanded telecommunications service benefiting virtually all.

Finally, it is only through demonstration in some sectors that we will bring pressure on service providers in other sectors (including public sector) to mend their ways. Already, public sector providers in banking, telecommunications and airlines have had to adjust their attitudes under competition from their private sector rivals. Under the able leadership of Lalu Prasad Yadav, even railways, a public monopoly, has become customer friendly. And the day may not be far when providers of electricity, water, education, health and even law and order will feel the heat.

(The author is a professor at Columbia and Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.)

Source : The Economic Times

Leave three hours to get there…

By Saritha Rai
Wednesday 30 July 2008

There were high hopes for Bangalore's multimillion dollar air hub, which opened in May. But locating it in a near wilderness without a decent road was not a great start, says Saritha Rai.

Raghu Shenoy, chief executive of a small Bangalore IT services firm, thinks nothing of jumping on a plane to see a client. If a customer wants a face-to-face meeting, Shenoy will be in Europe in less than 24 hours.

But he quails at the prospect of using Bangalore's new international airport. Even the businesses that lobbied for its creation are hardly breaking out the champagne.

For a start, despite a decade of planning, no one appears to have thought about how to reach the glass-and-steel structure. The $620m airport opened at the end of May, apparently in the middle of nowhere and without a new road link.

Shenoy's company has its headquarters in the gigantic Electronics City, a pristine suburban technology park, where neighbours include India's leading outsourcing companies such as Infosys Technologies and Wipro.

From Electronics City, the 65km trip to the airport can take three hours, outstripping the charge on most laptop batteries.

While top executives can use the expensive helicopter ferry service launching soon, others are obliged to factor in a five-hour lead time before boarding even 30- to 50-minute short-haul flights to neighbouring tech cities such as Chennai and Hyderabad.

Shenoy gets all the way to London from Bangalore in about twice the time his colleagues take to travel to the airport to catch a domestic flight.

The new airport was first conceived 17 years ago, when Bangalore was not even a blip on the globalisation map. In the past decade, as the government dithered monumentally, the city has turned into a verb - being "Bangalored" means your job is being offshored - and air traffic to and from the city had grown some 300 per cent, far above initial projections.

Dozens of multinationals such as Google, HSBC, IBM, Microsoft and Tesco have large operations in the city.

This year, some 11 million passengers will fly in and out of the airport and the technology outsourcing industry will account for a chunk of that.

Yet if air traffic growth has been fuelled by the business traveller, why is the new airport located in near wilderness, far from these businesses?

But then nothing has come easily for the technology industry in Bangalore. For want of a public transport system in the city, companies such as Wipro and Infosys run a fleet of hundreds of private buses to ferry employees to the workplace and back.

Faced with Bangalore's notorious power shutdowns, many run their own power-generating plants.

When hotel rooms in the city got scarce and exorbitant, some IT companies set up hotels on campus for their visitors. To spare thousands of their employees from getting stuck in the never-ending traffic jams that choke the arterial road taking them to Electronics City, companies are chipping in to fund the government's project to build an elevated expressway.

And yet, for businesses that pushed for the new airport, the frustrations are endless. For the best part of the ride to the airport, commuters have to jostle with fume-spewing three-wheelers, bikes, buses, cyclists and, as in most Indian cities, the odd stray animal.

Once out of the city and on to the speedier highway, drivers have to watch for pedestrians - workers from factories, inhabitants of the villages dotting the fringes of the expressway - darting across the high-speed stretch.

Traffic police work the route, not directing traffic but stopping pedestrians from hurtling into the path of vehicles speeding towards the airport.

The airport's swanky façade is attracting oglers from nearby villages, all trying to peer through the glass. Inside, commuters are less impressed.

When Shenoy arrived at the airport last month to board a night flight to London, he found the business class lounge overflowing even at midnight. Passengers have plenty of complaints: the aerobridges don't work, the wi-fi goes on and off, and the lavatories smell.

Certainly, the new facility is an improvement on the embarrassment that was Bangalore's old airport. In the words of a frequent traveller, it resembled a Greyhound bus station in a US town rather than an airport.

The airport was so cramped that the wait to clear immigration and customs and to retrieve baggage was interminable. Travellers eventually found their way out, only to be hounded by private taxi operators who fell on them like a pack of wolves.

The new airport with its 53 check-in counters and 2,500-vehicle car park is an improvement. But commuting three hours for a 40-minute flight is no one's idea of good connectivity. Harried techies are clamouring for the old airport to be reopened at least for domestic flights.

Bangalore's airport was conceived so it could give this otherwise gung-ho tech city an infrastructure edge and signal a change in its dodgy traffic and transport systems.

Now, the local talk is that it's only a matter of time before even obscure Chinese cities, wannabe Bangalores, plan and pull off better airports.

Source : Silicon.com
Story URL: http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,39024673,39265482,00.htm

India set to sign liberal aviation pact with EU

NEW DELHI: Indian airlines are set to get an improved access to European destinations. A liberal aviation pact between India and the European Union (EU) is on the cards, which will enable this as well as give EU carriers better access to India. In a way, the pact will work like an ‘open skies’ agreement between India and the EU.

According to civil aviation ministry sources, Indian carriers will get to operate a virtually unrestricted number of flights to European destinations like London, Paris and Frankfurt.

They can also enter into code-share pacts with European carriers without seeking government approval. On a reciprocal basis, European carriers will also get similar market access to India and be able to ink pacts with Indian counterparts without going through elaborate government clearances.

The proposed horizontal aviation agreement between the two sides provides far more flexibility than the air service arrangements being pursued by India with individual EU members. The liberal aviation pact between two of the world’s largest trading partners is expected to be signed in September when prime minister Manmohan Singh visits France to participate in the India-EU summit.

“Germany and the UK have already agreed to the terms of the proposed agreement. We are expected to negotiate with other member states as well shortly. The agreement is expected to be signed during the PM’s visit to France in September this year,” a civil aviation ministry official said.

The EU has similar agreements with China and the US. Currently, 26 bilateral air services agreements exist between EU members and India. The horizontal agreement between India and the 26-member EU would also allow people from either side to book an integrated ticket for travelling by different modes of transport.

It will also ensure technical co-operation between the two sides in areas like aviation safety, security and traffic management.

The proposed pact between the sides would remove nationality restrictions (from the EU side) in the bilateral air services agreements between EU members and India. This will allow any designated airline from the member states and India to operate flights to each other’s territory where a bilateral agreement with India exists and traffic rights are available.

The agreement will also pave the way for routing flexibility to European carriers, which means designated carriers of different countries may use each other’s traffic rights. For example, if a designated French carrier exhausts all its bilateral traffic rights with India, it can still operate additional services using traffic rights of the Netherlands.

But this comes with a rider—the French airline would have to operate from the country whose rights are being used.

It’s estimated that US and EU traffic constitutes about 30% of India’s total international air traffic.

Source : The Economic Times