What you have written is correct. Same is true
with fake doctors with false claims from foreign
non-recognized institutions running diploma
mills. And some of the shrewd fraudulent ones are
running drug trials on human beings as if they pigs.
And in this scenario almost everyone is including
VIP's are victims as we have been because such
fake ones are darling of MCI run by Ketan Desai &
Co. India's bureaucrats & politicians are famous
for poor safety standards and filling their
pockets. Air crashes, train disasters, Bhopal
Gas disaster, Radiation leakage in Delhi will
continue to take place as guilty are learned
arrogant people who cannot be punished for their
lapses. You can see Delhi university professors
laughing on Radiation lapse and none of them will
ever be punished for causing deaths and crippling living human beings.
Sanjiv Kumar Jain
At 09:14 AM 6/7/2010, M K Singhal wrote:
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: M K Singhal <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, 7 June, 2010 9:12:06 AM
Subject: EXPAT PILOTS IN INDIA
The next time a shady foreign pilot from strange country with a dubious
qualification or medical history crashes a plane,
you and I could actually be on it.
There has been a lot of discussion in the media
regarding foreign pilots (also known as expat
pilots) in the aftermath of the tragic air
accident at Mangalore. The Minister of Civil
aviation, many bureaucrats, airline officials
and even a few journalists have gone to great
lengths to explain how experienced foreign
pilots hired by Air India and private airlines
are essential to the Indian aviation industry. A
retired spokesperson of Air India, who has no
business to speak on behalf of Air India
anymore, has been repeatedly appearing on
television to painstakingly explain how
important foreign pilots are to the company.
Clearly the air disaster at Mangalore with a
foreign pilot at the controls has made a lot of
powerful people worried .Very worried.
The point however is not whether foreigners
should be allowed in Indian carriers or not.
Some of them are highly experienced and
respected professionals who have undoubtedly
made a huge contribution to the Indian airline
industry. This article is not about them. It is
about a shady scheme on gargantuan proportions,
backed by government policy and a well oiled
system that feeds on unimaginable corruption, on
a scale that would astonish every innocent fare paying air passenger.
Air India is a government run Public Sector
Undertaking and thus, it is assumed that rules
applicable to other government institutions
meant to keep corruption under check would apply
to it too. The Ministry of Defence, for example
has strict rules debarring the involvement of
private middlemen or brokers in facilitating
defence contracts. Other ministries have strict
guidelines on the recruitment of qualified
personnel or consultants where a transparent
tendering process has to be adhered to.
In the case of Air India and its subsidiary Air
India Express, such rules do not seem to apply at all.
Some years ago, the ministry of civil aviation
that ran erstwhile Air India and Indian
Airlines, cooked up unrealistic passenger growth
projections and placed massive aircraft orders
for Air India and Indian Airlines. Private
airlines only too eager to float shares to rake
in public money and capitalise on the hype
jumped in the bandwagon. Overnight, hundreds of
vacancies for pilots were created.
Air India began hiring foreign pilots in
2003.Other reputed companies like Singapore
Airlines and various Gulf Airlines such as
Emirates, recruit foreign nationals too but with
great transparency. Foreign pilots hired by them
are a part of the regular workforce and are
directly hired, without involving middlemen, on
local terms. European airlines do not hire non EU nationals.
In Air Indias case, no global tenders were
floated for foreign recruitment firms and no
advertisements in newspapers announcing
vacancies for foreign nationals appeared.
Bureaucrats and officials in Air India, hand in
glove with their counterparts and politicians in
the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Ministry of
Labour, Home Ministry, Ministry of External
Affairs and other agencies hastily cleared the
proposal to hire foreign nationals and the
policy of recruiting foreign pilots was
established. Politicians of opposition parties
were roped in and a cosy arrangement was made.
To bypass opposition from its own employees and
to circumvent elaborate transparent recruitment
procedures and various laws, a defunct
subsidiary,Air India Charters Ltd was revived
and used as the vehicle to issue foreigners
contracts. Hence the hundreds of foreign pilots
in Air India and Air Express are routed through
Air India Charters Ltdthrough recruitment firms
and then using a legal loophole, deputed to Air India and Air India Express.
Private firms comprising middlemen and brokers,
with the respectable title of Aviation
Consultants were approached and many of these,
such as Rishworth Aviation, Parc Aviation and
scores of others appeared out of the wood work.
Overnight, new consulting agencies sprang up,
some in murky tax havens like the Isle of Man and Channel Islands.
All suddenly began to offer experienced pilots
from all parts of the world. Many of these
foreign pilots had and continue to have no clear
track record. Some claim to have thousands of
hours of flying experience in countries as
diverse as Russia and Rwanda. Some of the
airlines and countries (such as Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia) that these pilots flew in do not
even exist anymore. No background checks are
carried out by either Air India or the Indian
Government. Strangely the agency of middlemen,
or consultant supplying the pilots, is entrusted with this task.
Lucrative contracts were tailor-made to lure foreign pilots in droves.
Decades of rules meant to harass Indian pilots
such as stringent medical standards were waived
off by the government for foreign pilots. Air
Indias pilots who are Indian nationals, have to
undergo a DGCA medical test known as a Class I
medical examination and then are again subjected
to an elaborate company medical test known as a
Pre Employment Medical Examination (PEME).None
of these apply to foreign nationals in India.
For example, an Indian pilot may not be allowed
fly an Indian passenger aircraft wearing a
pacemaker but a foreigner most probably would
because the medical standards in his country
allow it. There have been cases where Indian
pilots who are permanently medically grounded by
Indian authorities get foreign citizenship and
foreign licences and return to India to fly
planes on expat terms. At least two such foreign
pilots have served Air India on such a contract.
Infact foreign pilots flying Indian registered
aircraft are not even required to have Indian
flying licences! All they had to do is produce
proof of experience and a foreign licence and
the DGCA issues a temporary authorisation. Such
proof of experience could be a fake certificate
or a fake rubber stamp but nobody carries out a background check.
A foreign pilot is not legally answerable to the
Indian DGCA since he does not have an Indian
Licence. The DGCA can neither revoke nor suspend
his flying licence. Technically, an Indian Co
Pilot involved in a serious air accident may
lose his flying licence and his job; whereas the
pilot, if he is a foreigner can take the next
flight home and start life on a clean slate!
To prevent the foreign pilots from coming under
the ambit of direct taxes in India, the pilots
are officially based in foreign countries such
as Dubai and not given local terms of
employment. Every month Air India pays the
foreign recruitment agencies the salaries of
these pilots along with a commission or
consultancy fees to foreign bank accounts. This
is turn trickles back to the various politicians
and officials who patronise the system. Not
surprisingly, a foreign pilot who recently
approached Air India for a job recently was
asked to route his application through a recruitment agency!
As a result ,hundreds of crores of income tax
that would have normally gone to the Indian
Income Tax Department through TDS had these
pilots been based in India, is diverted to
foreign bank accounts in foreign countries
Liaison officers and advisors, meant to
facilitate business interests, are regularly
appointed by these foreign recruitment agencies
to liaise with the various ministries and
departments. Two of Air Indias senior most
executives have retired in the past one year and
have joined such firms as liaison officers.
Another, a retired CMD, continues to show great
personal interest in negotiating foreign pilots
contracts on behalf of recruitment agencies.
Foreign pilots are provided more leave,
sometimes upto ten days in a month the
justification being that they need to go home to
be with their families. Indian pilots flying for
Air India Express are made to go on postings for
fifteen days at a stretch and given one day off
at their home base. Ironically these Indian
pilots spend three to four days every month with
their families and the foreigners (who could be
from neighbouring Nepal or Dubai) spend more
than a week to ten days every month on holiday.
Foreigners also get paid a higher salary and are
entitled to five star hotel accommodations even
when not flying.As a result, hundreds of hotel
rooms are booked by Air India at exorbitant
rates a percentage of which presumably flows back to some officials.
This murky system in Air India of the past seven
years has quietly gone unnoticed. As long as
flights took off on time and passengers reached
their destinations nobody really cared. Unions
cried themselves hoarse- only to be drowned in
the din of the money power of powerful lobbies
and an ill informed media often hesitant to
upset a mega industry that generates lucrative advertisement revenue
The air crash at Mangalore need not have
necessarily been caused by an incompetent
foreign pilot. This article is not meant to
disrespect the majority of foreign pilots in
India. But the larger issue of rampant
corruption and greed must be addressed
immediately. Little wonder that all the
officials in the dishonest food chain are now
working overtime to cover up the issue. Sadly
the one hundred and fifty eight innocent people
that have been killed cannot speak for themselves anymore.
Therefore we, the rest of the nation, must stand
up in one voice to demand a CBI enquiry to unravel the mess.
We cannot afford to wait for another air
disaster to prove the politicians, bureaucrats and officials wrong.
----------
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