IC 814 captain, 24 others take Air India to Delhi High Court over pay disparity

NEW DELHI: Captain Devi Sharan may have boldly faced the seven-day-long hijack nightmare on Indian Airlines flight IC 814 in December 1999 when the Kathmandu-Delhi flight he was commandeering from Kathmandu to Delhi was taken to Kandahar. But even a man with his nerves of steel can no longer cope with Air India's failure to have uniform pay seven after the merger of erstwhile IA and AI.

Captain Sharan and 25 colleagues — all senior most executive pilots — have taken the airline to court for paying different salaries to people doing the same job. The case filed in Delhi high court, titled Dinesh Ahluwalia (erstwhile IA executive pilot) and (25) others versus Union of India and another (AI), has sought directions to AI to have similar pay for people doing similar jobs.

The anger in erstwhile IA pilots (who earlier flew narrow body Airbus A-320s) came to the fore when they graduated to flying the wide body Boeing 787s.
They started flying the Dreamliners with erstwhile AI pilots.

"Our pay per month is at least Rs 3 lakh less than our erstwhile AI counterparts. They get over Rs 9 lakh per month while we get Rs 5.5-6 lakh. Very often we are in the same cockpit, flying to the same destination. In this atmosphere being paid differently makes no sense and is only discrimination," said a senior erstwhile IA pilot.

Pilots say they took the step of taking AI to court over its failure to bring salaries on par in the combined AI even seven years after merger of AI and IA.

The petition in Delhi HC says: "The petitioner raised the issue of huge disparity in their remuneration (with management) several times after the merger of 2007. The petitioner as a well as other erstwhile IA pilots were time and again assured... that authorities would soon come out with a revised uniform remuneration allowance structure for all the pilots." Successive airline managements have failed to bring about pay parity in IA and AI. A senior AI official said: "Pay parity will be achieved in three years. There is a difference in pays historically which cannot be eliminated in one go. People who get less will get hikes and reach the level of those who are currently getting more in three years. The only difference then between pilots of wide body and narrow body aircraft will be the wide body allowance which pilots flying bigger planes will get extra as per global norms."