New Delhi: Miffed over getting a broken seat on an Air India flight, Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Saturday called out the airline’s poor passenger service and said that he wrongly believed that the carrier under Tatas would scale new heights.
“My impression was that Air India’s service would have improved after Tata took over the management, but it turned out to be my misconception,” the minister wrote in a seven-paragraph post on X.
Narrating his harrowing experience, Chouhan said that he was booked on an Air India flight (AI436) today and was allotted seat number 8C, which was broken and therefore uncomfortable to sit.
“When I asked the airline staff why the seat was allotted to me if it was bad, they told me that the management had been informed earlier that this seat was not good and its ticket should not be sold. There is not just one such seat but many more,” he said.
Chouhan, a four-time chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, said that his co-passengers requested him to change his seat, but he preferred to complete the journey by sitting on the seat allotted to him.
“I don’t care about discomfort in sitting, but it is unethical to make passengers sit on bad and uncomfortable seats after charging them the full amount. Isn’t this cheating the passengers?” he asked.
“Will the Air India management take steps to ensure that no passenger faces such inconvenience in future, or will it continue to take advantage of the passengers’ compulsion to reach their destination early?” he further asked, putting the airline in dock.
