Air India puts in place ethics governance structure

Tata group-owned Air India has put in place an ethics governance structure and is also establishing committees at the apex and regional levels to bolster the ethics culture at the airline, according to an internal document.

The apex ethics committee has been set up at the senior leadership level with Air India Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Campbell Wilson as its head and includes the airline’s Chief Ethics Counsellor, Chief Human Resources Officer, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operations Officer as its members.

This committee has the mandate to formalise ethics-related guidelines, approve policies and procedures related to ethics, and will be the final escalation point for the regional ethics committees.

Tata Group, which regained ownership of Air India from the central government in January this year, had in September announced a comprehensive transformation plan — Vihaan.AI — to put the loss-making airline on the path to sustainable and profitable growth, among others.

On the other hand, the regional committees will be responsible for building a “positive ethics culture” through continuous engagement, communication and ethics training, and will be supported by local ethics counsellors (LEC) and ethics champions in each region, as per the document.

Air India, in the internal communication, also informed the employees that it has brought in Gurjot Malhi as its Chief Ethics Counsellor (CEC) from Vistara, where he has set up a similar mechanism.

Malhi has been with the Tata group for ten years during which he has served as Advisor to Managing Director at Tata Steel, Advisor to Tata Sons in Bombay House and Advisor to CEO Vistara.

He has set up the structure of the ethics in Vistara and was the CEC at Vistara from 2014, before joining the current position last month, it stated.

Malhi will oversee and manage the ethics programme and initiatives, enabling the engagement on values and ethics within Air India, according to the communication.