30 April,2011 06:46 AM IST | | Bipin Kumar Singh
It's been three days of chaos, disorder and mayhem at the strike-hit airport, but neither the government nor the dissenting pilots are ready to back down from their demands.
The pilot body yesterday invoked the top brass of the management to do justice to their cause, citing the Nira Radia tapes against corruption as an instance to spur them into action.
ICPA general secretery Rishabh Kapur shows a copy of MiD Day that carried an interview of former
COO Gustav Baldauf during a press conference yesterday
The Air India management, on the other hand, circulated an SMS to the pilots, asking them to resume work before 5 pm, or face the consequences.
"We decided to commence the conference after the deadline given by the management had passed. We wanted to see if any pilots had gone back to work.
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We see that not a single pilot has bailed out. We are still on strike and will continue to be on strike till our demands are heard.
Sack the CMD, order a CBI enquiry and discuss our demands. We are willing to end the strike. We promise that we will be back to work as soon as our demands are heard," said Captain Rishabh Kapur, General Secretary of the Indian Commercial Pilots' Association (ICPA).
Asking for a CBI enquiry, the ICPA members demanded a thorough investigation of the mismanagement plaguing the airlines.
Kapur said, "We want to make this airline the best in the world. We want the government of India and the honourable minister of civil aviation to take action against the perpetrators of corruption."
He accused CMD Arvind Jadhav of misleading the aviation minister and feeding with him a distorted view of the pilots' demands.
The Air India management circulated an SMS to over 800 striking pilots yesterday, asking them to call off their strike by 5 pm.
"We informed them that on failure to do so, it would be liable to take any action against them," said an Air India spokesperson.
A high-ranked civil aviation ministry official from Delhi told MiD DAY that the ministry was toying with the idea of invoking the ESMA Act if the pilots didn't call off the strike in the near future.
