Anant Rangaswami
Enough is enough. There are too many stakeholders whose lives are disrupted every day – sometimes many times a day, thanks to the non-stop statements, claims and counterclaims on the issue. Employees receiving conflicting and constantly changing commitments on when they would get paid; fliers buy tickets on scheduled flights only to see them cancelled, banks and other creditors are promised payments which the airline has reneged on time and again. It’s not the easiest of things to do, but there must be a deadline for the uncertainty to end. Mallya keeps promising a solution – and every day that he is unable to solve the problem causes the problem to become larger, affecting all concerned. For example, if the airline had been shut down 6 months ago, employees, while being out of a job, would have been owed (then) just two-three months of their salaries; banks and other lenders would have frozen their liabilities earlier, and so on. It is the uncertainty that is doing damage today; to the shareholders who hold on to their shares in the hope that Mallya’s promised miracle will come true, to the suppliers who hope against hope, and so on. It’s time to end it all. There will be pain, but pain of a different kind. More importantly, closure will force the hard questions to be asked. How did Kingfisher Airlines get into this mess? What was the board of directors doing? What were the auditors doing? Why did banks continue to advance money? Closure will bring accountability. Today, Mallya manages to keep delaying the day of reckoning and the day of accountability. It is not unreasonable that he is given a deadline by which he presents a plan acceptable to all stakeholders to solve the problem. Once the deadline is crossed, be kind to the airline and put it to sleep.read less read more
Akshaya Mishra
No, a deadline for the revival of Kingfisher won’t work. Admitted it’s difficult for an airline with Rs 7,000 crore debt burden and Rs 8,000 crore loss to recover on its own. But think of the 6,000-odd employees. Shutting down Kingfisher would jeopardise their lives. The option for them to move out and join somewhere else is virtually closed given the dismal scenario in the aviation sector. The presence of such a vast army of employees would have a cascading effect on other airlines too. There’s no need to be sympathetic to Vijay Mallya - he has done a really bad job of running the airline – but for now he should be allowed to, and even assisted in, finding ways to revive the airline through bank support or whatever other means. Putting a gun to his head by way of a deadline won’t serve anybody’s interest.read less read more
