KATHMANDU, JANUARY 4

Minister of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation Prem Ale's recent public utterances about impending promulgation of the long-awaited legislation to effect unbundling of regulatory and service provision aspects of today's Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal seem to be premised on the hope of getting off-hook from the European Commission flight ban pariah list.

According to airline sources, the attempt also coincides with the timing of the arrival of auditors from International Civil Aviation Organisation in about a hundred days to assess Nepal's capabilities for safety oversight of the airlines and aerodromes service providers, which doesn't look appealing in the unflattering backdrop of the recent air crashes at Taplejung where the sitting minister of aviation Rabindra Adhikari died and that of the US-Bangla crash at Tribhuvan International Airport in 2018, where 50 passengers died. In the back drop of multiple fatal air crashes in the 2010-2012, leading to European fatalities on domestic flights, first the ICAO put Nepal on the ignominious significant safety concerns list swiftly followed by the EC ban that not only banned Nepali airlines from operating in European air space, but also essentially forbade European travellers from flying Nepali domestic carriers, by withholding insurance coverage.

In fact, in 2012, the then president of the ICAO Council Roberto Kobeh González, travelled to Nepal on an official trip to urge president Ram Baran Yadav and prime minister Baburam Bhattarai to do the needful, especially for the undermined state of aviation safety due to the prevailing conflict-of-interest situation, according to an under-secretary at the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation. In response, the top honchos of CAAN offered an undertaking to split the statutory body's regulatory and safety provision functions on a priority basis. However, due to the prevailing political uncertainty in Nepal, the message was lost.

"However, the Europeans were not to be distracted easily and continued to nudge Nepal's rulers at every possible opportunity," a former CAAN director general admitted.

Even when Nepal exited the ICAO's safety list in 2017, the EC has remained insistent on letting Nepal go off the flight ban list only when it makes good on its promise to the ICAO president, he added.

The legislation in the works at the Parliament remains vitally flawed in addressing the fundamental issue of conflict of interest, according to experts.

"While the governing board of the proposed regulator is to be chaired by the minister of civil aviation, the secretary of the ministry is slated to chair the board of the service provider organisation," they said, adding, "This arrangement, in no way, can ensure effective separation between the two entities as the secretary of the ministry enjoys office at the pleasure of the minister.

Thus, the minister will continue to command influence at the service provider organisation also.

Typically, ministers remain more interested in airport development works and will not hesitate in expressing their proclivities for a specific location based on political calculations and for specific contractors for obvious reasons, an aviation expert feared.

Inviting political interest has remained that of issuance of airline licences, while safety takes a back-seat. "Regardless of the purported administrative checks in place, airline licences will be issued at the minister's beck and call after all he heads the regulator's board and will continue to hold the director general by the scruff of his neck in the proposed legislation. Thus, effectively nothing much will have changed to hoodwink the EC or the ICAO," another expert added.

A version of this article appears in the print on January 5, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.