Congress leader Manish Tewari called the government’s decision to privatise Air India and transfer its ownership to the Tata Group a “disaster” over complaints about cancellations and delays, and described the airline as a “management mess”.

“The Government of India should take Air India back from the Tata Group. They have run the airline into the ground,” he wrote in a post on X on Friday (August 1, 2025), calling the privatisation exercise a “disaster”.

He lamented the cancellations and delays by Air India “at the drop of a hat”, and claimed that these were happening without any explanations being offered by the airline.

In a reference to appointees from Tata Group companies at the airline, he remarked that “pilots and crew tell me that people who grow tea in Tata Tea, make steel in Tata Steel, make cars in Tata Motors are running Air India” and labelled the airline as a complete management mess.

Tata Group took over Air India in January 2022 after it won the bid invited by the government for selling its 100% stake in the erstwhile national carrier. The airline has been at the centre of public and regulatory scrutiny since the June 12 crash in Ahmedabad that killed 260 people, the deadliest crash in the country in three decades, and the first involving a Boeing 787-8 aircraft.