



India’s aviation sector must be kept under close antitrust watch: Its rivalry deficit won’t end anytime soon
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Is India’s civil aviation crunch a thing of the past? Signals from IndiGo, the airline around which last month’s crisis of flight cancellations swirled, suggest it will soon be. As do public assurances of a return to normalcy from this sector’s regulator.
IndiGo has assured the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) of its compliance with new pilot-fatigue-reduction norms by 10 February. The air-carrier said that it would be ready to operate a stable schedule without the rule exemptions it was granted after its failure to run flights threw air traffic into chaos. To meet this aim, IndiGo had earlier outlined a plan to recruit pilots.
But its latest pledge follows a regulatory rap on its knuckles from the DGCA, which levied a fine of ₹22.3 crore on the airline and warned it not to stretch its capacity to a snap-off point again. If this sounds like a regulatory rebuke that’s too soft, or too pat a way to put the mess behind us, with its costs merely anecdotal at this stage, market power may have a plausible role in it. IndiGo’s share of domestic traffic hovers above 60% and its role in flying people looms over that of Tata-owned Air India, our only other major carrier.
Together, two private players have nine-tenths of India’s market. Akasa, SpiceJet and others are small players, and unless global aircraft scarcity eases, they would be hard put trying to widen their slices of the market’s pie. A silver lining around last month’s turbulence has been a clamour for more rivalry in Indian skies.
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