India Insight

Imagine yourself as the chief of an airline company. Here’s how things look there at a glance:

- You’re running an accumulated loss of 200 billion rupees (about $3.6 billion)

- You employ some of the best-paid pilots in the world. They have been known to go on strike whenever they want.

- You have 27,000 employees and 122 airplanes, the highest ratio of employees to aircraft in the world.

- You’ve been losing money for years.

You run Air India.

Newspaper reporters have been writing for years about who and what are responsible for this state of affairs. Columnists have rumbled on at length about why things are as they are. What nobody has asked: Why is Air India flying at all?

India’s state-run oil marketing companies launched a media blitzkrieg on Tuesday to justify a recent price hike in petrol prices and came out strongly against allegations of profiteering at the consumers’ expense.

Their logic, however, failed to answer why, while being entirely dependent on state subsidy, they are still eager to reward shareholders with rich dividends.

Here is the background.

A flurry of protests swept India recently after oil retailers announced the steepest price rise in the country’s history, leading to a partial rollback.

A few buses have been torched, a few trains have been stopped, a few people failed to get to work, a few shops were shut, a few lost their daily wages and the exchequer will register a big loss. Someone is telling India’s “common man” that this strike is in his interest.

The transportation shutdown that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and several left-leaning parties called for as a protest against a steep rise in petrol prices is seen as a means to exploit popular anger against the ruling Congress-led government, though political parties insist that they won’t benefit at election time.

A 12-hour ‘Bharat Bandh‘ (“India shutdown”) to protest against inflation in 2010 cost the exchequer 130 billion rupees, according to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). This time it can only be more. Given all of India’s other problems, can the country afford such losses?

I did something on Thursday that I never thought I would get a chance to do: I walked in the middle of MG Road, one of Bangalore’s busiest thoroughfares, and survived. This gesture normally would be suicidal, but today’s a different kind of day in Bangalore. An eerie quiet descended on parts of India’s call centre and tech outsourcing capital as a nationwide strike to protest petrol price rises shut down businesses and public transportation.

I rolled into town from New York City early Thursday morning, and went for a walk to find out how the “Bharat Bandh,” or “India Closed” (more or less), declared by India’s top opposition party, the BJP, and some other, smaller parties, was affecting the city. The sun was out, the humidity rising; it was a delightful day in the so-called garden city of India, but it looked and felt like a exaggerated Sunday, with men hanging out by their local paanwallahs, grabbing an idle smoke and noshing on fried goodies. Security guards drooped in plastic chairs in front of stores and offices, looking even more bored than usual. There were so few cars and motorcycles on the road that you could hear yourself think, and there was so little exhaust that the air nearly felt healthy. In other words: the strike was on.

To anyone who has never visited this city, this scene doesn’t sound all that novel. But Bangalore on a normal day is a near constant grind of traffic. Endless buses, motorbikes, autorickshaws, cars, and trucks, trucks and more trucks. To cross the street without assistance, particularly for a foreigner, merits the award of some kind of medal of honor. It is normal for someone unaccustomed to the density of traffic in the heart of this city to wait 15 minutes before crossing the street — and that’s when the light is on your side.

A combative Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said he would quit politics if charges of corruption in allocating coal blocks, levelled against him by Gandhian activist Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption team, are proved.

Singh has been criticised in the past for not doing enough to curb corruption in the government, but the one thing that has never been questioned, even by his detractors, is his integrity.

So why is Team Anna going after Singh? Especially since the allegations are based on a federal auditor’s draft report in which there is no direct proof of corruption or gains made by the prime minister.

"No, thanks," is the response most middle-class Indians give as they scoff at the idea of visiting a public hospital for medical treatment. And rightly so.

Run-down, poorly staffed and under-equipped, dilapidated state-run hospitals are full of patients waiting for a doctor or a bed in squalid corridors – in a scene that is played out across the country.

Reports abound of neglect and mismanagement. Of expectant women refused admission and giving birth outside hospital gates, of reckless fires which see patients burnt alive in their beds and of babies dying within hours of being born.

India is the land of colours, sound, and call centres -- or at least, that is what Western popular culture has been trying to reinforce over the past few years. "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", starring Judi Dench, is Hollywood's most recent expedition to India, and it sticks to the formula.

The film is a comedy about a group of British retirees, shunned or underestimated in their own country, rediscovering their desires and ambitions in India.

They are lured to Jaipur, the city of palaces, with an online advertisement of a hotel that promises a life of leisure to the elderly -- only to find themselves in a building on its last legs, run by an incompetent, hyperactive Sonny, played by Dev Patel of "Slumdog Millionaire". Patel's love interest is a modern young girl who works at a call centre.

After police busted a rave in a swanky part of Mumbai last week, the city’s drinkers have woken up with an almighty legal hangover.

Authorities have decided to enforce a 63-year-old law that requires every adult above the age of 25 to own a permit for alcohol consumption.

According to the Bombay Prohibition Act, introduced in 1949, every drinker in Mumbai needs a government permit — 5 rupees for a daily licence and 1,000 rupees ($18) for a lifetime permit.

“81 rupees?” asked an astonished TV anchor when an irate Bengaluru-based consumer called in after the recent 7.5-rupee hike in petrol prices. Perhaps cars that run on milk are now needed, the anchor suggested — when the caller said the dairy product costs around 30 rupees a litre.

While milk-powered automobiles might be a distant dream, the reality remains that those relying on petrol vehicles will now need to do their budgeting again. If a falling rupee and high inflation were not enough, this steepest-ever rise in petrol prices will surely pinch.

The fact remains that petrol prices were decontrolled way back in June 2010. That move gave oil marketing companies (OMCs) freedom to revise prices and also gave the government some saving grace as ministers can now easily say that petrol prices are market driven.

Indian milk and dairy products producer Amul’s campaign has a new subject — the rupee.

The newspaper advertisement features the iconic Amul girl, in her polka dotted red dress, in a boat made of the rupee, about to sink in turbulent waters. She says ‘mujhe mere rupee se bachaao!’ in Hindi. Loosely translated into English, it would mean ‘save me from my rupee.’

The tagline, tongue in cheek, says ‘valued highly’.

The Amul mascot’s angst today reflects that of investors who have so far been bullish on the India growth story.