Fly govt staff to promote air connectivity to small towns

NEW DELHI: Soon, you may find babus posted in smaller towns flying for meetings and conferences rather than spending hours to reach their destination by rail or road. The civil aviation ministry has urged state governments to entitle junior government officials working in these places to use airlines for official travel in order to create enough demand on regional routes.

The move is expected to encourage domestic airlines to operate more on these routes and promote air connectivity to tier II and tier III cities like Allahabad, Guwahati, Varanasi, Vijaynagar, Surat and Dehradun.

���We have asked the state governments to allow junior government officials to fly by air. It would not only create demand and promote air connectivity, making airlines��� operation commercially viable, but also generate employment,��� a government official said.

Earlier, when regional carrier Vayudoot was functioning , government officials at various levels were allowed to travel by air. This was aimed at reducing travel time of the officials and increasing productivity.

���States have been demanding air connectivity but it has to be a two-way process. As a facilitator of the growth, the government has to create an environment for private players to operate and survive,��� he added.

The government���s move is intended to further push air connectivity in smaller towns. In August 2007, civil aviation minister Praful Patel had announced a separate category of airlines called regional airlines. So far, at least four companies have been granted no-objection certificates to operate as regional airlines but none of them have taken off. Domestic carriers have been incurring huge losses on account of high fuel cost.

High fuel cost is generally attributed to various taxes levied by the government, particularly sales tax by states. Sales tax imposed by various states vary between 20% and 37%. Meanwhile, 35 non-metro airports are being upgraded and modernised by the government with an investment of Rs 41,000 crore to promote regional air connectivity.