Other States - Madhya Pradesh   

Aviation varsity plan to be unveiled at investors’ meet

Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh Government’s efforts to woo investments might soon allow it to accommodate world’s first Aviation University offering state-of-the-art training in 16 disciplines - including navigation, pilots and cabin crew - under one roof.

The project, conceptualised by one of the country’s leading aviation institutes, will be unveiled at the three-day Global Investors Summit scheduled at Indore from October 26, State Civil Aviation Department sources said here.

In three years span, the University will generate 17,000 jobs besides facilitating start of ancillary units of mechanical, electrical and construction works, said aviation experts, who discussed the project with the State officials.

At over 25 per cent growth every year, India has one of the world’s fastest growing civil aviation sectors but the industry faces severe shortage of trained staff, they said.

With tremendous spurt in aviation activities, a time will soon come when there will be a miss-match between equipment and manpower, which is noticed even now, the experts said.

Over 500 foreign pilots work in the country due to dearth of trained Indian pilots. There are no managers available for the new greenfield airports that are coming up in Bangalore and Hyderabad and so is the case of ATC staff.

“Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) estimates that India will add 500 aircrafts to its existing fleet in next five years,” experts said, adding “every aircraft will require 18 pilots (Commanders and First Officers) and 378 associated staff, apart from specialist staff like air traffic controllers, security and catering.”

In the last fiscal, the DGCA’s permissions to import 15 corporate aircraft were sought in the country, experts said.

Later, the figure took a tremendous leap when companies and individuals requested the DGCA’s permission to import 100 aircraft in 2006-07. Moreover, despite an increase of 25 per cent in the import taxation, the number is expected to rise even further this year, they added.

“One can very well see the shortage of trained staff that would emerge in next couple of years after the new aircrafts start operating in the country,” the experts said.

In order to meet the shortage, the proposed University in Madhya Pradesh, unlike any other institutes in the world, will offer training in 16 disciplines under one roof, thereby avoiding problems of synchronisation noticed when staff trained in different streams work together in an aircraft, they said.

Claiming that focus on training of pilots and cabin crew has gained prominence as “it is more lucrative for the institutes and offers quick returns on investment,” the experts said, “Though IITs and MITs offer courses for aeronautical engineers, who are basically designers. No institute offers courses for aircraft maintenance engineers or technicians.”

Very few ground staffs are trained in the country as no institute trains ATCs or airport managers or aviation managers, they added.

For almost all vocations there are a number of universities across the world, but there is none for aviation, either in India or elsewhere, they claimed.

The proposed University will offer training in technical disciplines of piloting, ground handling and flight dispatches, aeronautical engineering, aircraft maintenance engineering, navigation, radio operations, metrology, simulator, fire-fighting and disaster management and computer-aided devices (CAD) programming.

The University is also expected to attract foreign students. With quality training establishment at lower costs, India offers a more exciting training ground than the US, Europe and Australia, experts said. -- PTI

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