If Air India's Maharaja is in the red today, one man - Praful Patel - is largely to blame for it.

On August 2, 2004, four months after he took over as civil aviation minister, Patel, now the minister for heavy industries, chaired a meeting that decided to inflate Air India's purchase order from the original proposal of 28 aircraft to 68 at a stupendous cost of  Rs 50,000 crore.