India’s civil aviation regulator, DGCA, will hire more than 400 employees in different capacities to bolster its surveillance capability, according to people aware of the plan, as Indian airlines increase their fleet size to match the pickup in demand for air travel amid the easing of pandemic restrictions.
The finance ministry has given clearance to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to hire permanent staff for about 410 posts, the highest in a decade, the people cited earlier told ET, requesting not to be named.
A senior authorities official stated that whereas the variety of business planes of Indian airlines has practically doubled since 2014, the regulator has not created new everlasting job posts since 2014 to deal with the elevated workload attributable to extra planes and elevated flight frequencies, together with those of international airlines.
“The final time DGCA noticed contemporary hiring in full-time positions was in 2014, instantly after the US aviation regulator FAA had downgraded India,” the official stated. “Whereas the variety of planes has increased from 400 in 2014 to 700 now, no contemporary positions have been created within the DGCA.”
The DGCA has around 1,300 staff. Of those, 634 work within the departments that look into flight security and airworthiness of the 700 business planes. Compared, the US aviation regulator, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has around 45,000 technical workers for 7,700 business planes, or six folks per plane.
Based on an estimate by the aviation ministry, Indian airlines are seemingly to add, in common, 100 planes yearly as they give the impression of being to rebuild their companies after Covid-19. Domestic air traffic in India grew by 64% year-on-year in August 2022, with 11 million flyers taking the sky, according to the DGCA.
The recruitments on the DGCA, which will probably be executed via the Union Public Service Fee (UPSC), will probably be for positions in in-flight security, airworthiness, coaching and the requirements division.
Foreign auditors, together with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and FAA, have usually identified in their audit of Indian aviation security preparedness that the DGCA is beneath staffed and lacks enough educated workforce for surveillance. During the FAA’s audit final 12 months, the regulator had crammed up positions of 47 flight operation inspectors and 35 consultants in the airworthiness division. But the positions of consultants will not be everlasting.
