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The first meeting of the newly constituted Consultative Committee of the Parliament attached to the Ministry of Civil Aviation held today under the chairmanship of Civil Aviation Minister, Shri Praful Patel. In his opening remarks Shri Patel said that the entire civil aviation sector in the country needs to grow and expand rapidly to keep pace with the rest of the world. He emphasised the need to improve air connectivity in the country, as it is crucial for growth and economic development.
Regarding the air travel in the country the Minister said that this has to be made more affordable and observed that one of the main cause for the slow growth in the civil aviation sector is due to the inadequate infrastructure and also the high ATF cost. He said that the operating cost due to high ATF cost in India accounts for almost 30 percent which is almost double the global levels. He promised to take up the matter with the Finance Ministry with the cooperation of the Members of Parliament so that Finance Ministry can impress upon the state governments to reduce state sales tax on ATF.
Shri Patel also told the members that the Ministry has prepared a plan to upgrade the domestic airports apart from the metro airports so that they will have international standard facilitaties and would be designed in the modular form so as to meet the future requirements. The Minister also said that the low cost Air India Express wherein the fares will be 30 percent less than the regular fare will be started from some of the places in south India like Cochin, Trivandrum, Hyderabad and promised to cover the other parts of the country in phases for the benefit of the passengers bound for Gulf and middle east.
The Minister also announced that in order to accommodate more passengers from J&K the Haj quota has been increased from 72 to 82 thousand and Saudi Arabian Airlines has been requested to provide more number of seats for Haj pilgrims. He also said that in order to improve information facilitation for the passengers, call centres with toll free numbers would be opened across the country shortly. He also announced that Air India will start a new flight from Mumbai to London on 2nd December, 2004 which will come back to Delhi on 4/5th December, 2004.
Members of Parliament who were present at the meeting were: S/Shri Rahul Gandhi, Tusharbhai A. Choudhary, Madhu Goud Yashki, Ananth Kumar, Santosh Gangwar, Ratilal K. Varma, Ashok Argal, Ramswaroop Koli, Tarit Baran Topdar, A.Krishnaswamy, Umakant Yadav, Akshay Pratap Singh, Anandrao Vithoba Adsul and Dr.(Prof.) Prasanna Kumar Patasani, Santosh Bagrodia, K.B. Krishna Murthy, Dr. M.S. Gill, Janardan Dwivedi, Dr.(Smt.) Najma A. Heptulla, Dinesh Trivedi, N.K. Premchandran, Abdul Wahab Peevee and Rajeev Shukla.
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