UK MP Dhesi meets Air India officials for connectivity

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, June 21

British Sikh MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi met various key members of Air India’s senior management including its International Director for Operations Captain Arvind Kathpalia at London, who had flown to London especially from Delhi at the recently held celebration of 70th anniversary of Air India’s first flight between London and Mumbai.

Disclosing this on phone, Tan Dhesi, who hails from Raipur village in Jalandhar, said he had spoken to the Air India’s senior management about the pending demand of the Punjabi diaspora for direct flights between Heathrow airport and Amritsar airport, and the progress made in this regard.

Dhesi said “Captain Kathpalia had confirmed that he had received all the required information about the demand from his UK team, in particular the new UK and Europe Regional Manager Debashis Golder”. He has assured that in consultation with others in New Delhi he would soon be making the final decision on connecting the two major tourist hubs.

The UK MP had earlier hosted the UK Parliamentary launch of the campaign for direct flights between London and Amritsar and gained the support of other parliamentarians in Britain and India. He said statistics show that in 2016, even with no direct connectivity approximately, 1,88,869 passengers (517 per day) travelled between Sri Guru Ramdas Amritsar International Airport Amritsar and UK, as transit passengers via other Indian and foreign airports.

Dhesi said he was aggressively pitching for ensuring direct contact with UK and Punjab, a crucial demand of the Punjabi diaspora since direct flights to holy city were cancelled years back. He suggested to the Air India representative that there were three daily direct flights between Heathrow-Delhi and one of these could be extended to Amritsar so that people from the Northern states could also benefit from direct connectivity with Europe.