The sky’s the limit

Passenger air traffic within India has been growing at nearly 12 per cent in spite of the fact that fuel costs here are very high compared t...

Passenger air traffic within India has been growing at nearly 12 per cent in spite of the fact that fuel costs here are very high compared to many other countries. One of the obvious reasons for this has been the high professional standards, productivity and customer satisfaction that private airlines have been able to offer to passengers who now have had a choice while forcing competitive improvements in the national carriers. Jet Airways, which started just a decade ago, holds 48 per cent of the traffic share in the country — well ahead of the national carriers which have had the benefit of a captive market for a long while.

The NDA government had opened Indian skies to SAARC countries and other neighbours in Southeast Asia, but only in a limited way. The government has been reticent to open up private airlines to the Gulf region for fear of the competition to our own national carriers in a sector which is perhaps the only profitable route for the national carriers carrying the burden of their inefficiencies. The US offer to open its skies for any Indian airline, in a reciprocal arrangement, comes at a welcome time and promises to be a landmark move. Aircraft are available now to make direct travel between the US and India routine, cutting time and costs. We already have two million Indians in the US, and the American private sector is getting more involved in a range of technological, industrial and commercial activities in India. All this should boost air travel between the two countries. At the moment, air traffic between the US and India is now at the 1.5 million a year mark and likely to touch the 2 million level in the next five years or so. The existing bilateral agreement is grossly obsolete and must be updated with the new open skies proposal at the earliest.

Concurrently, we must attend to aviation infrastructure in India — including the building better airports — on the highest priority. We must look at the open skies strategy as a stimulus for our national carriers to grow rather than become an obstacle to the further expansion of civil aviation in this country.