Background– There is a saying in the business circles that:-
If you want to become a millionaire, then start with a billion and invest in airline.
And another one related to Air India is :-
If Jaitley wants to sell Air India, he may have to give money to someone to buy it.
Nevertheless as AIR INDIA is on its sleeping pills, lets look at some interesting facts about it.
And Yes, The Air India uses Pochampally Silk Saree- It is a Geographical Indication from Telengana. (Pochampally Saree or Pochampalli Ikat is a saree made in Bhoodan Pochampally, Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district, Telangana State, India. They have traditional geometric patterns in Ikat style of dyeing. The intricate geometric designs find their way into sarees and dress materials. The Indian government’s official air carrier, Air India, has its cabin crew wear specially designed pochampally silk sarees)
Details–
With the recent buzz about Air India privatisation plans, there has also, naturally, been a lot of talk of the airline’s glory days under J.R.D. Tata. But the person who has been completely forgotten in all this is the man who actually thought up the idea of Air India, and whom JRD himself referred to as “undoubtedly the founder of Indian air transport”.
Nevill Vintcent was a veteran World War I pilot. In the 1920s, he worked in South-East Asia as a pilot and aviation evangelist. But he then moved to India, where he believed the scope for aviation was much greater.
In 1928, Vintcent spotted an exciting new business opportunity: Britain’s Imperial Airways was starting an international service across Asia to Australia, and Air France and KLM were to follow shortly with services to Vietnam and Indonesia.
These airlines would carry mail as well as passengers, and the mail bound for India would be unloaded at Karachi. From there it would be delivered to its destinations in the subcontinent by rail—a process that would take several days.
Vintcent, with his experience of flying mail in Malaya, conceived the idea of a domestic air mail service that would pick up the international mail in Karachi and deliver it to destinations in India within 24 hours.
Since he didn’t have the resources to set up such an airline himself, Vincent took his idea to a leading Parsi industrialist, Sir Homi Mehta.
Mehta, however, wasn’t interested in the idea himself, but suggested that Vintcent talk to the Tatas instead.
Enter the Tatas
Sir Dorabji Tata, the then chairman of the Tata group, was sceptical of Vintcent’s idea, but his up-an-coming nephew, the 24-year- old JRD, was an avid aviation buff himself, and helped persuade him to support the venture. Thus, Tata Air Mail was born, with an investment of Rs2 lakh.
The airline bought two single-engined Puss Moth aircraft with an average speed of 50 miles (80km) an hour, carrying a consignment of mail (and, in case of need, one passenger who could sit on top of the mail bags).
The pilot would navigate by following the railway lines below and, in case of doubt, resorting to a slide-rule that he carried in his pocket. The chief pilot of this new airline was Vintcent.
Tata Air Mail’s maiden flight took off from Karachi on 15 October 1932: J.R.D. Tata carried the mail from Karachi to Mumbai. And then Vintcent, waiting in the second aircraft, carried the remaining mail from Mumbai to Chennai, stopping for the night at Bellary.
The infant airline consisted of “one full-time pilot, two part-time pilots, one part-time engineer, and a couple of apprentice mechanics”. Its headquarters was a palm-thatched shed on a mud airfield at Juhu, which was submerged below sea level every monsoon, forcing them to shift base to Pune. The airline’s motto, as JRD later recounted, was “Mail may be lost but never delayed; passengers may be delayed but never lost.”
In its first year, Tata Air Mail went on to make a profit of Rs60,000, carrying a total of 10 tonnes of mail, as well as 155 intrepid passengers. Its service was, from very the beginning, outstanding.
The Directorate of Civil Aviation noted in its 1933 annual report, the airline had a 100% punctuality record, “even during the most difficult monsoon months”; it went on to wryly suggest that Imperial Airways “might send its staff to Tatas to see how it’s done”.
Soon, the airline extended its service to Delhi (via Indore, Bhopal and Gwalior), Hyderabad, Goa and across the Palk Strait to Colombo. It had also upgraded to larger, more sophisticated aircraft, and was carrying more passengers, so it changed its name to the more appropriate Tata Airlines.
In 1938, 34-year-old JRD was appointed chairman of the Tata group, but his main interest continued to be the airline, for which he saw an extremely promising future, given the emerging global aviation trends.
Manufacturing dreams
The outbreak of World War II, however, was a major disruption for Tata Airlines; its services were commandeered by the government to carry troops and military supplies.
But JRD and Vintcent spotted a very exciting alternative opportunity—to get into aircraft manufacturing to help the war effort, drawing on their own aviation experience, combined with the resources of the Tatas (the Tata group was already making armoured cars called Tatanagars for use against Rommel’s armies in North Africa). They believed aircraft manufacturing would be a great business opportunity, especially in the post-war world.
In 1942, JRD and Vintcent submitted a plan to the British government to set up a company named Tata Aircraft, which would mass produce bomber aircraft in Pune; the model they proposed making was the De Havilland Mosquito that was playing a key role in the RAF bombings of Germany, including the “Dam Busters” that had destroyed key dams and flooded Ruhr Valley.
The project was approved, and Tata Aircraft was set up, with a large plant in Pune, ready to start production. But by then the course of the war had changed and the RAF no longer needed bombers; it needed gliders for the forthcoming invasion of Europe.
Vintcent flew to England to discuss the change of plan with Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s minister for aircraft production. On his way back to India, Vintcent was supposed to fly Imperial Airways. But the problem was the civilian airline flew by a long, circuitous route to avoid being attacked by German fighter aircraft. So, in his characteristic hurry, Vintcent managed to wangle a lift on an RAF bomber, which would help him get back to India faster.
Somewhere over the Atlantic
Unfortunately, the aircraft never reached its destination; it vanished off the coast of France. Back at the Tata headquarters in Mumbai there was great confusion, because officially Vintcent and his aircraft were simply reported as missing.
JRD kept waiting for Vintcent to somehow turn up, but as the weeks passed it became clear that he had been shot down over the Atlantic. His body was never found. A few weeks later, JRD received a letter from the British government cancelling their order for gliders—a big blow to the Tatas, who had made a huge investment in the project.
JRD is said to have kept a photograph of Vintcent on his desk in remembrance, alongside that of his father. Vintcent’s death was a great blow to him, because it was his vision, experience and energy that had played a key role in creating and building the airline.
What’s more, just before he died, JRD and he had been discussing the airline’s future in the exciting new world that would open up at the end of the war, especially given India’s strategic position on the international air routes. That exciting future did indeed come to pass, with Tata Airlines evolving into Air India, and going international—but Vintcent himself was not there to see it happen.
Today, sadly, Nevill Vintcent is just an unrecognizable figure in an old photograph, standing next to JRD, nothing more.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.