Mr Praful Patel

Journalists in the capital are having a field day reporting various aspects of the draft civil aviation policy. Unfortunately, the policy is nowhere near clearance as the Union Cabinet decided to refer it to a Group of Ministers (GoM) and so far there are no indications on even the composition of the group.

The draft policy is quite exhaustive and because civil aviation is currently a `happening' sector, there is considerable interest in what the Government has in mind. But what the industry is anxiously waiting for is not what has come out so far. Among the various proposals in the draft policy is an innocuous clause that seeks a carte blanche for the Civil Aviation Ministry to decide on when a domestic private airline can fly abroad. Currently, there is a Cabinet decision on the fleet size and number of years of domestic operations before an airline is allowed to go overseas. The Ministry now wants this decision to be out of the Cabinet's ambit and left entirely to itself. Veteran politicians in the Union Cabinet seem to have felt that such unrestricted power to an individual Minister won't fit into the scheme of "collective responsibility" of the Cabinet and have hence deferred the matter for the moment.

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