The Delhi Airport Metro Express will be shut down from Sunday till August-end to carry out repairs of faults that have been identified as “small” but “crucial” to passenger safety.

On Saturday, the Union Urban Development Ministry, the Delhi government and the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), which carried out civil works on the line, said they agreed with the concessionaire, Reliance Infrastructure’s decision to close down the service for repairs. However, there is no clarity on who was responsible for the faults and who will foot the bill.

Urban Development Ministry Secretary Sudhir Krishna said he would wait for a report by an expert committee on what led to the faults.

“Faults have been identified on the interface between the girder and the pillar at several places along the Metro Line. Initially, it was thought that repairs would be carried out without having to suspend service, but the concessionaire decided that for carrying out proper repairs in lesser time, it is best to shut down the service.” A committee comprising officials from the Indian Railways, the Delhi Metro and Reliance Infrastructure had been asked to examine the defects and submit a report within 10 days.

“Technical experts have begun inspections and engineers have been asked to revisit the whole design. Work is expected to be completed in one or two months,” Mr. Krishna said.Mr. Krishna said the line would be reopened only after an inspection by the Commissioner for Metro Rail Safety.

Out of 2,100 bearings in the elevated section of the corridor, 230 need corrections.

On the scepticism about the quality of construction of the Airport Metro Express, he said: “We are confident that the line will last over 100 years, but right now the focus is on how to rectify the faults and not on who is responsible. The depth and the spread of the problem will show up in the report.”

Delhi Chief Secretary P.K. Tripathi brushed aside queries on the DMRC role coming under the scanner. The DMRC had carried out the civil works of the high speed corridor that was being run on a public-private partnership (PPP) model.

“There should be no knee-jerk reactions,” he told journalists.

Mr. Tripathi also ruled out commuter inconvenience, pointing out that a large number of people still opted for radio taxis and buses to reach the airport.

“Public inconvenience is not the only issue; public safety is more important.”

Mr. Tripathi parried questions on the practicality of PPP models and the problems that had plagued the Airport Line.

“Not making profits”

For his part, the Chief Executive Officer (Infrastructure) of Reliance Infra, Sumit Banerjee, said the closure had nothing to do with the company not making profits. “These are canards being spread by some people. This line is not making profits, but the decision to shut down the services is purely based on safety and not on finances.”

Asked who would bear the cost of repairs, Mr. Krishna said the liability would be on the contractor, IJM, which carried out the work for the DMRC.

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·  “Passenger safety is utmost priority”

·  Panel to find defects and submit report within 10 days

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article3614849.ece

Delhi Airport Metro to suspend operations on safety concerns

Reliance Infrastructure to seek compensation for closure period starting today

New Delhi, July 7:

Reliance Infrastructure may seek compensation from the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) for the period during which the Airport Metro services will be closed.

The Delhi Airport Metro Express Line — the country’s first public-private partnership (PPP) metro project operated by the Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Infrastructure — will be closed from 5:30 a.m. on Sunday.

It has been decided to suspend the service after safety concerns were raised over the viaducts — part of the civil structure of the line — which are the responsibility of DMRC.

‘Temporary suspension’

There is no clarity on when the services will resume, with the company stating there will be a “temporary suspension”.

When contacted, a Reliance Infrastructure source said: “At present, our priority is to resume the service at the earliest. On compensation, we will obviously go by the concession agreement, which would definitely have such a clause.”

DMRC operates the Metro network, which has a peak daily ridership of 20 lakh passengers.

Operational for just over a year, the airport express line connects Central Delhi with the Indira Gandhi International Airport — operated by GMR Infra — in just 20 minutes. It charges a premium fare for the service. It has already clocked 8,800 hours of operation and carried 68 lakh passengers. It also offers baggage check-in services, like the metros in Hong Kong and London.

Reliance Infra is also implementing the Mumbai One metro project, where the company is responsible for both civil construction and coaching operation, along with Veolia Transport and Mumbai Metropolitan Development Authority — its partners in a special purpose vehicle.

This development, however, has rekindled the debate over what the implementation mode of Metro projects should be.

Dr E. Sreedharan, known as the ‘Metro Man’ after the Delhi Metro’s success story, has always been a vocal critic of PPPs in Metro rail operations, pointing out that most Metro systems require Government subsidy.

During the bidding for the Hyderabad Metro — being built on PPP mode — Dr Sreedharan had written to the Planning Commission Deputy Chairman, Mr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, against the manner of bidding. The Hyderabad Metro bid was first won by Maytas but was subsequently taken over by Larsen & Toubro following Maytas’ inability to implement the project.

In his book, Metro Rail Projects in India, former Urban Development Secretary Mr M Ramachandran cites examples of two Metro systems — in Kuala Lumpur, and one each in Bangkok and Manila — all of which were taken up with private funding. These projects came up without any time and cost overrun. But with lower-than-projected ridership, the Government took over the revenue risk in the Manila project and intervened in its restructuring .

“In the Asia Pacific region, India is perhaps the only country that is experimenting with a PPP model for the Metro,” Mr Jojo Alexander, Managing Director-Transport, Alstom, which will supply coaches to the under-construction Chennai Metro, had told Business Line.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-economy/article3614181.ece

Will Kingfisher loan ground Bank of Maharashtra?

The stock of Bank of Maharashtra may react negatively to a media report that the bank changed rules to lend more to United Breweries group, controlled by Vijay Mallya. The report quoting a whistleblower from the bank said the UB group company might have really raised money for the group’s struggling airline, Kingfisher. “The changes in terms, conditions and purpose of the loan are worrying. And BoM might well sanction further amounts.” Kingfisher has a debt of over Rs 7,000 crore and has not paid employees’ salaries for months. A UB Group spokesperson, however, asserted that there was no “practice of inter-company funds diversion,” the report clarified. It may be recalled that in a stinging report in September 2011 on Kingfisher Airlines, a Canadian investment research firm Veritas had come to the conclusion that both the airline and Mallya's holding company UB Holding (UBH) are effectively insolvent. – K.S. Badri Narayanan

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-markets/article3617567.ece

Pilots’ wings clipped

The end of a 58-day strike by a section of Air India pilots last week, with none of their demands conceded, demonstrates two things. The first is the limits, if not futility, of industrial action even by the most specialised and highly-trained workforce when business conditions, both internal and external to the organisation, aren’t too good. The second concerns the reasonableness of demands, in the eyes of the management as well as the wider public. In this case, the strike involved only pilots flying on the national carrier’s overseas routes and not their domestic sector counterparts belonging to the erstwhile Indian Airlines, which has since 2007 been merged with Air India. But the strike by the 424 pilots — out of Air India’s total of 1,500-plus — was enough to cause the state-owned airline some Rs 650 crore in losses and ground much of its wide-body aircraft fleet used for international operations, that too in the peak travel season.

If despite all this, the agitation yielded nothing for the pilots though, it only points to the current market realities — of a loss-making airline with accumulated debts of almost Rs 45,000 crore, whose survival hinges on a Rs 30,000 crore taxpayer-funded bailout over the next eight years that is subject to certain milestones being met. By striking at such a crucial juncture, the pilots were clearly overestimating their own strength and underestimating the dire financial straits faced by not just Air India, but the entire airline industry. No management with its back to the wall would have tolerated such action that ultimately benefitted only rival carriers, which merrily hiked fares. The losers were Indian workers in Dubai or Doha having to pay through their nose to fly home, Air India, and the pilots themselves, who are now practically seeking only reinstatement and withdrawal of legal proceedings against those whose services were terminated during the stir.

That raises the legitimacy of the original demand itself. The pilots’ agitation was not primarily over salaries or allowances, but about denying their colleagues now flying single-aisle aircraft in the domestic sector, the right to even train on the new Boeing-787 Dreamliners being acquired by Air India. In other words, they wanted to reserve the privilege of long-haul flights — guaranteeing more flying hours and, hence, faster promotion from co-pilot to commander rank — exclusively for themselves. This, the Government could obviously not have agree to, especially after the Indian Airlines-Air India merger that made it technically difficult to discriminate between the crew of the two previously-separate domestic and international carriers. Even the general public would be loath to such guild-like arrangements intended at maintaining the monopoly of particular trade. While one may sympathise with strikes by blue-collar contract workers over pay parity with regular employees, the same yardstick cannot be applied to those drawing monthly salaries of Rs five lakh or more.

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The Government is right in denying squatting privileges to the erstwhile Air India pilots merely because they were the original inheritors of a corporate logo.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/article3617547.ece