You cannot hide behind advisories: Venugopal slams Scindia over high airfares

Congress leader K C Venugopal on Tuesday fired a fresh salvo at Union Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia saying that he should take concrete action to control rising airfares rather than hiding behind advisories and quoting random figuresrdquoVenugopal and Scindia have been sparring on Twitter since Sunday over the state of the aviation sectorOn Monday the minister hit back at the Congress general secretary organisation saying he was cherrypicking facts to attack the BJP government while forgetting the stepbrotherly treatment meted out to civil aviation during the UPA ruleTagging Scindias long Twitter post from Monday Venugopal tweeted that this entire flight price fiasco is unravelling the criminal extent to which the Ministry of Civil Aviation neglected passenger welfare and the aviation sectorThe more we dive deeper the greater the mess we see You have opened a Pandoras box JM_Scindia ji he saidAs per the ministrys own affidavit in the Jet Airways insolvency case airport slots are neither assets nor rights of the airline but mere permissions granted on a use it or lose it basis Venugopal saidAlso readlsquoIn MP BJP govt gave just 21 jobs in 1095 daysrsquoIn 2020 then MoS Civil Aviation HardeepSPuri ji in response to a Parliamentary Question stated that Jet Airways slots were being reallocated on a temporary basis In this case as well if GoFirst is not using its slots these must be allocated to other airlines on a temporary basis Why is the govt treating the GoFirst crisis differently he saidVenugopal also termed laughable Scindias assertion that the AERA Airports Economic Regulatory Authority of India is an independent bodyVenugopal said the AERA is run by a sitting IAS officer and its other officers are appointed by the government which also determine its budgetIs it independent in the same way that the ED CBI and IT Dept are independent the Congress leader askedYou conveniently skipped the part where it was the Modi government itself which hiked the excise on ATF Aviation Turbine Fuel from 8 per cent to 14 per cent before scaling it back to 11 per cent When ATF constitutes nearly half the cost of operating an aircraft these seemingly small changes make a huge impact Venugopal said in his tweet on Tuesday hitting out at ScindiaYou cannot hide behind advisories which have no legal bearing and quote random figures that fly in the face of exorbitant prices faced by consumers on a daily basis Unless you take concrete action and not create paper tigers this crisis will not be solved the Congress general secretary saidHitting back at Scindia for his criticism of the UPA governments handling of the aviation sector Venugopal said that as far as the growth of the aviation sector under the UPA is concerned the number of Indians travelling by flights grew from 303 million on 200304 to 918 million in 201011He said there was a 300 per cent increase facilitated by historically high levels of economic growth and the creation of the Indian middle classIt was during the UPA era that low cost travel boomed with the rise of Indigo Spice Jet and Go Air then a flourishing venture along with the expansion of existing airlines which ensured the Indian middle class took flights for the first time Venugopal saidHowever the Modi governments hollow PR is for all to see As per the Ministrys own admission to the Parliamentary Standing Committee in Feb 2022 only 22 out of 94 UDAN routes are in operation The Shivamogga airports inauguration alone cost 21 crore because PM Modi was cutting the ribbon himself he saidThe death of Jet Airways the ongoing struggles of SpiceJet for many years and now this GoFirst saga are all testament to the complete mismanagement of the aviation sector by the Modi regime he allegedVenugopal in a tweet Sunday had said hard facts and everyday suffering of the middle class cannot be wished away by distorting figures and misrepresenting the actual facts on the ground PTI