Revival of ‘Great People to Fly With’

Nothing new in what the recently-appointed CEO of PIA ‘revealed’ at a press conference

There is nothing new in what the recently-appointed CEO of PIA, Air Marshal Arshad Malik, ‘revealed’ at a press conference on Tuesday. If one went back to what his predecessors had said in their first press conferences after taking over the reins of the airline, one would fail to detect an iota of difference in the cliché-ridden story except a disturbing increase in the losses with every new takeover. One could, of course, do a more analytical study of the strategic plan to revive the airline after the Air Marshal had presented it to the PM in March.

Meanwhile, let us first be very clear about what exactly is PIA. It is a public-sector undertaking, not a commercial enterprise. The success of such undertakings is not measured in terms of financial profits they make, but by the social profits that accrue to the nation as a whole. That was perhaps the motivation in 1955 to turn the Orient Airways into PIA — the only physical link between East and West Pakistan and between the settled areas and those regions of the country which were inaccessible by any other means. That such an undertaking would never be making enough money to keep it economically sustainable was well known to those who had come up with the idea of Great People to Fly With to be financed by the annual budgets. It was only when Washington Consensus overtook the free world in the late 1980s introducing users’ charges in health and education that public-sector undertakings began to be measured on their ability to earn their keep. If they failed they were asked to sell their assets and/or borrow from the market. That is what PIA has been doing all these years to reach where it is today. The new government which has promised to turn Pakistan into a social-welfare state would do well to try to revive the national carrier with focus on social profit rather than financial one. 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 17^th, 2019.

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