'Middle Eastern airlines sucking talent out of India'

Airlines in the Middle East are sucking up the talent out of India leading to a dearth of qualified and competent people back home, a leading industry executive has said.
According to Ravi Menon, the executive director of Air Works, a Mumbai-based aircraft maintenance company, the biggest risk to the maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) space or aviation space is a lack of qualified and competent people. Indian airlines currently opt to go abroad for much of the maintenance work on their planes.
"In the last two months, we as an organisation saw 12 key personnel resign to move to Qatar," Menon told The National.

Airlines in the Middle East are sucking up the talent out of India, he said.
According to him, there are schools but those schools are perhaps more theoretical in their approach rather than an element of practical training.
"Anyone can open a school but who is going to train the trainer? These are certain questions that we will be faced with. We're going to need to have the right hand-holding from developed aviation markets to really participate in this entire training process," he said.
Menon rated India's tax and duties structures as one of the biggest challenges in the sector.

"For India, although people talk about competitive labour pricing, that labour arbitrage can't be leveraged because it is offset by the high duty and tax structure.