Air India in rough weather; seeks loans to meet working capital needs

Facing financial headwinds, Air India is in discussions with public sector banks to seek working capital loans to tide over cash paucity which also caused delay in December salary payments to a section of employees. Despite making an operational profit for the first time in a decade in 2015-16 at INR1.5b, the airline has reported cumulative losses of more than INR7b in the first 6 months of this fiscal. "As long as we have debt and losses in our books, we are bound to have cash paucity. There is a cash crunch currently also and to tide over the problem, we are talking to the banks for some working capital loans," highly placed sources said. However, they said the current cash requirement is just "marginal" and the situation is not so bad that it can hit operations. <br/>