SINGAPORE, May 1: The unseemly haste with which the outgoing Deve Gowda government gave the thumbs down to the long pending Tata-Singapore Airlines joint venture has obviously been a cause for disappointment to the one-million (Singapore) dollar airline.

But Singapore Airlines (SIA) does not appear to have given up on the project yet. Speaking to The Financial Express at a function marking the airline's 50th anniversary celebrations, chairman S Dhanabalan indicated that both the venture partners had decided to adopt a wait and watch approach. "Everybody in India seems to be in favour of the project, except the government," he said. But while no move had been made by the Tatas to withdraw the application, the SIA chairman expressed a sense of fatigue at the unpredictability of India's policy-making process. "There have been calls for our resources from other quarters," he said, when asked whether SIA was willing to wait indefinitely for a reversal of New Delhi's decision. Asked to elaborate further, he drew attention to the speech made by Singapore minister for communications Mah Bow Tan earlier on Thursday morning.

Referring to the need for SIA to cope up with the intense competition for the regional aviation marketa result of liberalisation, deregulation, and escalating coststhe minister had said one way out of the dilemma was "through striking alliances". Alliances ranged from code-sharing arrangements to full-blown strategic partnerships and complete mergers.

Lately, there had been rumours about SIA embarking on a joint venture agreement with Sempati Air of Indonesia, a country which has deregulated its domestic aviation sector in recent years.

However, Dhanabalan declined to comment on the matter. He was more explicit in his response to a question relating to the fate of the international airport project in Bangalore, another India-Singapore joint venture that is hanging fire. The bone of contention appears to be the terms of the project. While the original agreement was that it would be on a build-own-operate basis, the government is now insisting that the foreign partner should agree to (build-own-operate-transfer. The argument from the Singapore side seems to be that it would not be economically viable for them to agree to these terms, since such infrastructure projects take an inordinately long time to yield profits. In this case, too, Tatas are its Indian partner, and a Singapore consortium is the foreign arm.

Dhanabalan, who is a director of Parameshwara Holdings, one of the main investors in the consortium, was quite categorical in pronouncing that "As far as Parameshwara is concerned, we have pulled out of the project".

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.