New Delhi: The crash of the Ahmedabad-London Air India flight may also cast a shadow over India’s lofty aviation goals, highlighting a critical gap between the country’s “civil sector aviation ambitions and its institutional capacity”, report Krishn Kaushik and John Reed in the Financial Times.
“India is extremely ambitious about becoming a global airline hub,” Vinayak Chatterjee, co-founder of the Infra Vision Foundation, an infrastructure-focused think-tank, told the Financial Times. “There has been a huge mobilisation of capital to build airports in the country.”
“Air India and IndiGo, the country’s de facto airline duopoly, have bolstered this effort with bumper purchases of new aircraft, ordering 470 and 500 planes, respectively, in 2023, in what were both record deals globally,” the report also says.
FT’s Krishn Kaushik also looks at the Adani Group’s move to “press ahead” with its investment deals and “shrug off” the impact of the US criminal charges.
“He [Adani] said on Tuesday that no one from the group had been charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and, while the group was cooperating with the legal processes, “our governance is of global standards, and our compliance frameworks are non-negotiable,” the report says.
“The Adani brand did take a hit from the US indictment, while some international plans, including fundraising efforts, were stalled. But the group has been returning to the markets this year to refinance debt and revitalise its plans,” it adds.
India suffered a “humbling defeat” in its test series against England, writes Simon Burton in The Guardian.
“They revealed something of themselves here, a game when their catching has been unreliable, their fielding often poor, their captaincy unremarkable, their batting a mix of feast, famine and failure—five centuries, six ducks, two catastrophic collapses—and their fighting spirit prone to sudden disappearance,” he writes.
25 June marked 50 years since the Emergency was declared, and a “young democracy and the world’s largest—froze,” writes Soutik Biswas in the BBC.
“The press was silenced overnight. On the eve of the Emergency, power to newspaper presses in Delhi was cut. By morning, censorship was law.
When The Indian Express newspaper finally published its 28 June edition—delayed by a power outage—it left a blank space where its editorial should have been. The Statesman followed suit, printing blank columns to signal censorship. Even The National Herald, founded by India’s first prime minister and Indira Gandhi’s father Jawaharlal Nehru, quietly dropped its masthead slogan: ‘Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might’,” says the report, a look at the onslaught of changes brought on during the time.
In an audit following the Air India crash, the DGCA has found multiple maintenance lapses like “recurring defects that indicate inadequate monitoring and correction,” reports Mihir Mishra in Bloomberg.
“The findings point to an aviation safety culture that hasn’t kept up with the industry’s rapid growth in India. Among the failings: Aircraft maintenance engineers ignored safety precautions and reported snags to be rectified, and defect reports generated by the aircraft system weren’t being recorded in technical logbooks,” says the report.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
Also read: Turbulent times for Air India & the cost of India’s hill station tourism boom