Air India — India’s first transnational company — was promoted by the private business house of Tata and J.R.D. Tata in particular, in 1932. After independence, because Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s love of socialism mandated that all important companies should be in the public sector and government managed, Air India was nationalised in 1953. However surprisingly, the national airline managed to maintain its reputation because JRD was retained as chairman until 1978.

Ironically, JRD was finally fired by the short-lived Janata Party government under Prime Minister Morarji Desai, one of the few politicians of the time who respected India’s private enterprise tradition. After that the deluge. Air Marshal P.C. Lall, retired chief of the Indian Air Force, was appointed chairman of Air India and the public sector Indian Airlines. But he couldn’t stop the neta-babu brotherhood and the lumpen bourgeoisie from swamping Air India. Unsurprisingly, in 2022 when AI was de-nationalised by the BJP/NDA government, the airline had run up a cumulative loss of Rs.50,000 crore, of which Rs.30,000 crore had to be written off by the BJP/NDA government to persuade the Tatas to re-purchase their former airline.

But despite efforts of the new management, old habits die hard. Recently, an AI flight from Chicago to Delhi was obliged to return midway because toilets of an ill-maintained aircraft were choked. Investigations revealed that all manner of goods including towels, plastic bottles had been flushed down the toilets. For that, the Tatas are less to blame than the country’s defunct education system. How so? An estimated 15,000 government schools don’t have toilets at all and toilet etiquette is not included in school curriculums. What the neta-babu brotherhood never understood — and still doesn’t — is that everything is connected with education.