Air India merger led to a mess: Ashwani Lohani

Ashwani Lohani, chairman and MD, Air India, has blamed the carrier’s woes on the merger with Indian Airlines that never took off as expected and previous bosses who pinned the responsibility on employees for its dismal state of affairs. In a hard hitting blogpost, Lohani said Air India now had a bureaucracy bigger than Indian Railways. “Earlier I always believed that the great Indian Railways was the mother of all bureaucracies but not any longer. Here, at the national carrier, the ridiculousness of the process and the diehard belief therein has been carried to a mind boggling extent,” Lohani, who took charge of the carrier in August of last year, wrote. Air India merged with the erstwhile Indian Airlines in 2007 which led to several human resource woes and huge operational losses. <br/>