NEW DELHI: While Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi is touring the country to highlight the problems of farmers, his mother and party president Sonia Gandhi has taken up the cause of unemployed pilots trained at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi. In a letter to civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapati Raju, Gandhi raised concern over the dismal record of campus placements at IGRUA as only 30% of the successful trainees get employed even after Air India and Qatar agreed to recruit pilots from the institute. “Air India had committed to take 50% of its needs from IGRUA. Yet, they are recruiting type-rated pilots, thus, ruling out IGRUA product,” reads her letter dated April 1, 2015. Type-rated pilots are trained on a particular kind of aircraft – Boeing or Airbus. She also wants the government to convince all airlines to hold campus recruitments at IGRUA. Air India, which has about 1,400 pilots on its rolls, is in the process of hiring 197 commanders and first officers for its Airbus A320 planes and has received 450 applications for the advertised positions. “IGRUA is the finest flying training institute in the country and AI used to hire pilots from the institute. The airline prefers to hire from the open market as it facilitates an arrangement where the children of pilots and other employees of the airline can be hired,” said Jitendra Bhargava, former executive director at Air India. An e-mail and text message sent to the Air India spokesperson seeking comment wasn’t answered. IGRUA is located in Rae Bareli — Sonia Gandhi’s Lok Sabha constituency — and the foundation stone for the institute was laid in 1985 by then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, himself a pilot. The institute produces about 150 trained pilots every year and about 50 of them get placed in various airlines. The ministry is preparing a reply to Sonia Gandhi’s letter. A civil aviation ministry official explained that there are over 4,000 freshly trained pilots in the country who are waiting to get employed. Pilots from IGRUA are hired as trainees and receive additional training on a particular type of aircraft, depending on the airline’s requirement. “The aviation industry in India is facing a huge shortage of commanders and airlines hire foreigntrained commanders to bridge over the shortage. As far as freshly trained pilots go, there is no shortage,” the official said. The official added that Qatar, as part of its bilateral seat entitlements, had committed to recruit pilots from IGRUA but has not done so. “We had, in the past, raised this issue of not recruiting pilots from IGRUA with Qatar, who say that the quality of pilots trained from the institute do not meet their standards,” said the ministry official, who did not want to be identified. An e-mail query sent to Qatar Airways did not elicit any response till the time of going to print.