The 268 employees of Air India currently stationed in its 24-storey eponymous building at Nariman Point in Mumbai have a rare privilege no other office-goer in the area can think of.
Each employee, stationed across the 14 floors that the public sector carrier occupies in the building, has a built up area of roughly 840 sq ft to oneself.
This area ? equivalent to the size of a mid-size flat ? is the largesse the Maharaja has been able to afford his employees in the island city, known as the most expensive real estate market in the country.
In response to an query filed by The Indian Express under the Right to Information Act, Air India said that it occupies 14 floors in the building for its own use and has currently got 268 employees working in the building, which makes it just 19 employees per floor.
Apparently each floor in the building has a built up area of roughly 16,000 sq ft. The total built up area of the building is 3,88,310 sq ft.
Air India also said that at its peak, 1,500 to 2,000 employees worked in the building and if one assumes that all 24 floors were occupied by the airline, then that would have made it 83 employees per floor.
The number of employees stationed in the building also seems to be on a decline. While the number stood at 300 as on March 31, 2013, it fell to 268 in just one quarter.
The commercial use of the building also seems to be sub-optimal. The company has only managed to put up only 6 floors on rent leaving four floors still vacant.
Four floors have been leased by State Bank of India and two by TCS, along with parts of two other floors that the IT major shares with Bank of India.
The vacant floors mean that almost 64,000 sq ft area is lying vacant and at an average rental of Rs 337.5 per sq ft. that Air India is currently getting from its existing tenants, it is losing out on rent of over Rs 26 crore per annum.
However the sub-optimal usage of the floors occupied by Air India is resulting into huge notional losses.
