DNA Money Edit: From scrap to restaurant, Air India has a lesson?

It's never easy to disinvest corporations. Selling assets is relatively easier, that is. And lessons from mistakes of the past are never learnt.

For a government which couldn't even sell personal jet of the erstwhile owner of Kingfisher Airlines, selling off flying elephant Air India would surely be a hard task.

The scariest part of Air India is its debt burden, and the decision to gift the winning bidder three-forth of that, which comes to a little over Rs 30,000 crore, is a bad idea. Plus, the winning bidder wouldn't get any share of Air India's assets, such as land, to pay off any part of it.

What the winner would get instead is the not-so-envied army of staff whose employment has to be protected for at least a year.

Political and social opposition to any future large-scale layoff can be difficult to handle.

Meanwhile, most of the Indian prospective bidders like Indigo and Jet have politely declined.

That leaves only foreign players, another political hot potato.

Can we expect some innovative approach to this disinvestment? Selling off in bits and pieces also looks difficult as nobody would touch the rotten pieces.

Talking of innovation, a restaurateur from Ludhiana is reportedly doing great by buying a decommissioned Airbus 320 at scrap value from Air India, and carrying it all the way to his hometown on a trailer to convert it into a theme restaurant named Hawaii Adda!

Is there a lesson here?