UDAN is slogan-worthy but not worth boosting

livemint.com:

airport back-up and helipad support. Indeed, it would not be a surprise if the Centre opts to sweeten the deal in an effort to attract more takers. With a long patch of weak competition in Indian skies expected to give way to an air-capacity boom as a new era of rivalry gets underway, a relaunch will have its advocates.

What we may well need, instead, is a quiet winding down of UDAN. This is a complex sector. As unsold seats go waste, it is a market of perishables, one marked by such supply rigidities that prices—which vary by demand—tend to be volatile.

This effect is amplified on sparsely travelled routes, whose ticket sales swing too wildly for seats to be aptly committed. Under stiff pressure to contain costs and optimize operations, airlines would need an outsized lure to devote their precious resources to such services. At times of aircraft scarcity, that incentive would have to go even further up.

Over time, it would also have to pay for the brand-image risk of service instability, which is a put-off for customers. All added up, achieving a map of air coverage idealized by the state could prove far more expensive than its benefits can justify. It will not be anytime soon that most Indians can afford air-fares anyway, even with out brisk economic emergence, and the sky may turn out to be the limit for what it costs to reshape a market that’s given to evolving its own way.