HYDERABAD: Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) working president KT Rama Rao (KTR) has asked IndiGo airlines to respect local languages after a woman was allegedly made to shift from her seat on a flight as she understood only Telugu.
Rama Rao was reacting to an incident that took place on the Vijayawada-Hyderabad IndiGo flight on September 16. As per a tweet from Devasmita Chakraverty, an assistant professor of education at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, the woman on IndiGo 6E 7297 was forced to move from seat 2A (XL seat, exit row) to seat 3C since she could only understand Telugu and not English or Hindi. There was a security issue, the attendant claimed. Devasmita Chakraverthy referred to the occurrence as discrimination in her tweet, which included a picture. In response to her tweet, TRS leader and Telangana minister Rama Rao demanded that IndiGo management start respecting local languages and travellers on regional routes who might not be fluent in English or Hindi.
"Dear Management of @IndiGo6E, I beg you to start respecting passengers who may not be fluent in English or Hindi and local languages. Increase the number of employees on regional routes who speak the native tongue, such as Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, etc. There will be mutual benefit from this "KTR, wrote.
Mahua Moitra, a member of the Trinamool Congress, backed KTR. She said that all of the flight attendants on European short-haul flights departing from London spoke their native tongue.
The tweet from the minister aroused discussion. While some Twitter users agreed with him, others criticised him for making it about language."This is so that those seated in the escape row can provide extra vigilant in an emergency by opening doors, talking to others, etc. To portray it as a language barrier is unfair, "Subbaraju, a Twitter user, wrote.
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