Vegetarian in cattle class

Air India may have reduced consumer appetite for its services

State-owned airline Air India’s decision to eliminate non-vegetarian meals from its economy class flights may not quite be in the same category as various state governments’ decisions to ban cow slaughter and the selling of beef. A meal served on board a domestic flight should hardly be a matter of much controversy — few journeys exceed two hours, after all. But there is good reason for the uproar that has erupted on social media, and it concerns the rationale for the decision. Air India's management claims the move is aimed at cost-reduction: Eliminating non-vegetarian food for economy class travel will slim down the airline’s annual Rs 400 crore food bill by Rs 8 crore. It will also, or so the airline says, reduce waste and simplify matters for the crew by enabling each flight to carry the exact number of meals rather than two options for unspecified numbers of vegetarian and non-vegetarian passengers. None of these reasons passes closer scrutiny. It is possible to argue that every saving, however small, counts for an airline that has been on taxpayer life support since 2012. Even so, a two per cent reduction in a food bill is surely a waste of management bandwidth when the airline is reportedly reeling under losses of over Rs 3,000 crore — and has been hauled up by the Comptroller and Auditor General for, basically, fudging its 2015-16 performance by claiming an operating profit. 

Successive turnaround plans have repeatedly referred to the need to focus on big-ticket items that will enhance efficiencies without impairing service standards, and there are many obvious ways of doing do. High on the list is, and has been for a long time, improving aircraft utilisation — aircraft are often grounded for days for lack of spares, adding to leasing charges — paring costs for lodging crew in lower grade hotels rather than five-star hotels (a point the CAG highlighted) and selling the vast amounts of real estate the airline owns at home and abroad. Second, when other airlines leverage information technology to enable passengers to state meal preferences as a way of maximising logistics, it is hard to understand why the national carrier cannot do the same. Alternatively, it could reduce ticket costs by making meals an optional extra (again, easy to do with online bookings). In any case, if the management were really so concerned about the size of the overall food bill, a more meaningful saving would have entailed going the Southwest Airlines way and eliminating meals altogether and serving only nuts, juices and water on board. No one would have questioned this decision, but the weak business case for this selective culinary exclusion has, inevitably, raised questions about the real motive. Given the food fundamentalism that is steadily being imposed by a narrow section of ideologues, principally aimed at Muslims and Dalits butalso at all non-conformists, this is not an invalid concern. 

Air India has claimed that its own surveys have suggested that passengers are becoming more health conscious and demanding vegetarian meals. This is hard to believe when government surveys show that progressively prosperous India is also becoming increasingly non-vegetarian in eating habits -- between 71 and 88 per cent of the population eat meat, eggs or fish, depending on which study you choose to believe, according to a thewire.in report. All in all, this culinary restriction is unlikely to help Air India, now fourth in market share, to fly out of the red. On the contrary, as the national carrier heads for the auction block, it will only give customers another reason to choose a competitor.