India Uncut

This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here. This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

A continent with 175 planes

Praful Patel, the union minister of Civil Aviation, tells Shekhar Gupta:
From day one, my dream was that can India not be one of those countries where people actually fly as we travel by train in India? We are a billion plus people. We are a continent by ourselves. And do you know how many planes we have? Only 175. Including the turbo props, the smaller jets ... I am talking of the commercial aircraft, not the private aircraft. And the United States — with a third of our population — has 8000 commercial planes; West Europe has 5000 commercial planes.

The interview is the transcript of Gupta's chat with Patel on Walk the Talk, the talk show on NDTV 24x7. It is a good one, with Gupta asking hard questions and Patel giving honest answers. Read the full thing.

Update: Oddly, not all of the TV interview made it into the transcript Indian Express carried. Gaurav Sabnis has more.
amit varma, 5:21 PM| write to me | permalink | homepage

I recommend: