OPINION

Ticket to nowhere: India’s chaotic skies need more competition

The IndiGo meltdown November-December 2025 and India’s ‘ghost airports’ all point to a lack of vision and forward planning. Why India’s skies need more competition, not less.

by Vijay Verghese/ Editor

JUMP TO Previous columns

How did a single carrier end up dominating over 60% of all traffic? Why India's skies need not just more thoughtful competition but increased supervisory accountability.

INDIAN skies were steadily deregulated in the early 1990s ending the long state monopoly by the incorrigibly indifferent Indian Airlines and Air India. Private air taxis mushroomed. Low cost carriers emerged. New names sprang up on airport flight information displays — Pegasus, Sahara, Air Carnival, Air Costa, Damania, Air Mantra, Ambica, Indus, Jet Airways, Modi Luft, Paramount, Kingfisher, Vijay and Zooom Airlines, to name a few. All have vanished without a trace.

In 2025 the Indian skies imploded again as IndiGo (with a roughly 60% domestic market share) struggled to meet new pilot-rest and rostering requirements by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation that had come into effect 1 November. The number of night flights had been cut as well. Almost simultaneously, its entire Airbus A320 fleet had to be briefly grounded to fix an urgent software glitch as the disruptive winter fog rolled in across North India. It was a perfect storm. Air India, the second major carrier, suffered disruption too but not on the epic scale of IndiGo, which cancelled 1,232 flights through November and then 1,600 flights on 5 December alone. It was a systemwide meltdown.

While the rostering changes had been announced almost two years earlier, IndiGo — a super low-cost airline with a 90% on-time record and one of the few profitable operations in the country — was seemingly caught off guard. It simply did not have enough pilots to handle its vast capacity, despite the forewarning, and then its planes vanished from the skies.

Send us your Feedback / Letter to the Editor

How did this happen? And what were regulatory bodies doing over the past two years? IndiGo’s success is largely built on a uniform fleet that allows for faster pilot training and the ability to switch spare parts and crew rosters with speed. It runs lean with no fat in the system. Planes too are bought in bulk at attractive discounts, sold to aircraft lessors and then leased back to avoid upfront capital costs. On 29 November as Airbus announced the recall of 6,000 A320s worldwide, this ingenious monoculture became an enormous liability.

{"India’s derelict ‘ghost airports’ include ego and vote-bank projects launched before election campaigns. Some have been closed due to lack of demand...

Yet, within a few days both IndiGo and Air India confirmed that 323 aircraft (200 of these belonging to IndiGo) had undergone the required software ‘downgrade’ to an earlier 2022 setting after Airbus announced intense solar storms had caused a sudden and dangerous drop in altitude of a US JetBlue flight resulting in a few passenger injuries.

Responding to the unprecedented scale of passenger distress, the DGCA rolled back its rostering deadline to 10 February 2026, an about-face described as a ‘dangerous precedent’ by the Airline Pilots Association of India. So it is back to square one. Not much has changed despite around 10% of Indigo’s slots being parcelled out to other smaller players. This could be too little too late.

Looked at another way, it could be seen as unnecessary interference in a private company’s ability to earn profit in open, market-driven skies. Prior to deregulation, government interference was rife  on fares, routes, schedules, and VIP access to seats. In early December 2025, the Ministry of Civil Aviation moved to temporarily introduce caps, and rightly, on fares — criticised as ‘opportunistic’. On popular routes like Delhi-Bangalore air fares had jumped from Rs6,000 to almost Rs40,000 one way.

At the end of the day, airlines are not like the railways or the bus system. Flying is by definition more expensive on account of shortened journey time, mode of travel, and other privileges. Travel costs are based on journey time and comfort. There is no gain in tinkering with this. Prices climb and adjust downwards too, but this requires greater airline choice and more flight times and frequencies for the consumer. This along with better roads and railway alternatives and efficient transport hubs to link all these nodal services, complete the mix at all price points.

India’s monopolistic skies need aggressive competition — with strong safety protocols —  especially on high demand routes. Airport operations and runway usage need to be optimised to open up slots perhaps through re-bidding for key periods. The slot stranglehold by legacy carriers must end to allow newer and younger options.

Importantly, government taxes and sundry charges on all aspects of flying (often seen as a fatted calf to exploit) must be better managed and trimmed in the consumer interest. Exorbitant landing fees, apron charges, state fuel taxes and, now, sharply rising airport usage fees (passed on to passengers) to make up for past lapses and oversights is simply burdening future travellers for historic errors. At Delhi International Airport the User Development Fee (UDF) is up for domestic travel from Rs129 to Rs1,261 (US$14) and for international travellers from Rs650 to Rs6,356. The Mumbai UDF has shot up to Rs3,856 per passenger (domestic) and Rs13,495 (US$150 for international flights).

Cheaper Russian oil imports have not resulted in attractive airfares or lower aviation turbine fuel (ATF) costs — the increased profits gobbled up by state and private oil refining companies.

The Indian government’s ambitious UDAN scheme — with price controls on low volume regional routes — has been a failure, making it unprofitable for any airline, howsoever lean, to operate. This has resulted in random and costly infrastructure with resoundingly empty airports and access highways. All this comes at a cost  to travellers and the tax payers who ultimately foot the bill for incompetence and poor planning.

India’s derelict ‘ghost airports’ include ego and vote-bank projects like Azamgarh in eastern Uttar Pradesh state, which was inaugurated in March 2024 with much fanfare just before the parliamentary elections despite community objections over land acquisition. By November 2024 the airport was closed due to the lack of demand. It is one of several such white elephants.

Kushinagar, also in UP and on the Buddhist circuit, opened an international airport in late 2021, which had ceased regular commercial flights by November 2023. According to ConstructionWorld.in, “Eight Airports Authority of India (AAI)-operated airports in Gujarat have collectively recorded losses of Rs818 crore [US$91m] over the past decade, with Rajkot airport accounting for more than half the amount.” These include Porbandar, Bhuj, Diu, Deesa, and Kandla.
 
Add to the list Muzaffarpur in Bihar and other smaller airports in UP, Tripura, Maharashtra and Sikkim and you get a sense of the overall chaos. All are fully staffed but with a trickle of flights or zero services. Both the DGCA and the Ministry of Civil Aviation must be held to account for this, among other players.

Despite this appalling track record, airfares in India have climbed well above the international norm. According to a recent survey by the Airports Council International, airfares in general were 10% higher post-pandemic in 2024 compared with 2019. However, domestic fares in a few countries stood out with India recording a 43% increase during this period along with Thailand (26%), and Malaysia (36%).

Indigo’s recent woes could be a boon for smaller airlines that lack the seats and slots. This is where the government can step in to encourage genuine competition through long-term incentives rather than knee-jerk diktat. Underutilised feeder carriers can play a useful role in competitively servicing low volume or fringe sectors with smaller aircraft designed for such routes — linking these places with larger travel hubs serviced by widebody players. For this to happen, taxes and fuel costs (often paid in US dollars but with earnings in a fast depreciating rupee) need to be recalibrated to affordable levels. It is time for accountability and an overall rethink and reset.