Rekha Mohandas was travelling alone from Muscat to Thiruvananthapuram by Air-India (ai)when a delayed take-off caused the flight to land at Dubai three hours late. Since the duty hours of the crew were over, the flight did not proceed to Thiruvananthapuram. Rekha, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, was stranded at Dubai airport for 15 hours. AI provided her no accommodation. Rekha filed a complaint before the District Forum (consumer court) in Thrissur, and obtained an order awarding her Rs 10,000 as compensation, to be paid by the airline.

Nothing extraordinary about the case this far-but what followed makes an eloquent comment on why AI (and most of our state undertakings) score so poorly in the public's estimation.

In its appeal to the state commission challenging the order, Ai claimed that accommodation had been arranged for her at Mumbai, therefore there was no deficiency of service.

Ponder over this: a woman in advanced pregnancy gets stranded at Dubai and is forced to spend 15 hours sitting in an airport lounge due to the airline's delayed take-off, and the carrier says accommodation was kept ready at Mumbai, 2,000 km away, and hence her claim that she had been inconvenienced, was untenable.

The state commission dismissed AI's appeal, pointing out that the airline was aware of the expiry of duty time when the flight left Muscat, and that it should have made alternative arrangements for the convenience of passengers.

Consumer magazine Insight points out in the December 2001 issue that if a flight is delayed, "it is the airline's duty to provide accommodation", but airlines often get away with letting passengers fend for themselves, especially on foreign stopovers.

-Sakuntala Narasimhan

Cyberabad's Flights of Fancy

N. Chandrababu Naidu's dreams for Hyderabad simply can't take off without a decent airport. The one at Begumpet, in the city's centre, as it were, is simply not good enough and the Andhra Pradesh chief minister is building a new one in Shamshabad on the outskirts of his capital. In the meantime, Naidu is leaning on the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to extend the runway at Begumpet so that wide-bodied planes can land without difficulty.

It's a nice idea that would have been even nicer if it didn't flout environmental laws and give nearby residents noise scares. Activist citizens have moved the Andhra Pradesh High Court against the proposal to lengthen the runway by 1,110 ft on the eastern side and 410 ft on the western side.

On its part, AAI has happily gone about threatening to dismantle buildings that come in its expansionist way, the habitat be damned. It raised the hackles of the state's Pollution Control Board as well. Amid all these, Naidu's dreaming of making Hyderabad an international aviation halt between Europe and China.

-Amarnath K. Menon

Me-Too Mahatma

Saptahik Reporter is Bihar's new weekly. The inaugural function was presided over by Chief Minister Rabri Devi. It had the owner comparing his paper to Mahatma Gandhi's Young India and lamenting the decline of journalism from "mission" to "business". All very well except that the publisher, Rajballav Prasad Yadav, is a minister in the Rabri regime, implicated in a criminal conspiracy in his native Nawadah, and had used the first issue to attack his arch rival, Jail Minister Ashok Chaudhury.

-Farzand Ahmed