Red carpet for foreign airlines, red light for desi ones

Indians are now among the world's biggest travellers but this has hardly helped our home-grown airlines, thanks to the government's lop-sided policy that appears to favour foreign airlines over desi ones. As a result, in region after region, the lion's share of seats are taken up by foreign carriers while the Indian carriers are left with a fraction.
The reason for this pro-foreign bias is a cabinet decision to allow only those Indian carriers to fly abroad that have an experience of flying for five years and has a fleet of at least 20 aircraft. However, foreign carriers can fly into India even if they are start-ups and have just one or two aircraft.
Check this out. Mihin Lanka is a two-year-old Lankan airline with just one plane, and it flies into Varanasi, Gaya and Tiruchirapalli. RAK Airways is another two-year airline from UAE with two planes. It flies to Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. Bangladesh's United Airways, is two years old, has three planes, and flies to Kolkata. There are several such examples.
In contrast, Spicejet started in 2005 and has 19 aircraft but can't fly abroad. Nor can Indigo which started in 2006, has a fleet of 22, and holds the best on-time record among Indian aviation companies. It's the same story for Paramount and Go, both four-year old airlines. Never mind that they fly longer routes within India than many overseas routes -- the Delhi to Trivandrum route, for instance, is longer than Mumbai to Dubai -- but they can't still fly overseas.
The net result: the seat entitlement of foreign airlines has gone up from 22.8 to 77.5 million seats per annum from January 2004 to December 2008 -- an increase of 239.5%. The beneficiaries of this largesse include little-known new airlines like Air Arabia, Tiger Airways, Jazeera and Air Asia.
21/10/09 Saurabh Sinha/Economic Times

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Categories: Foreign Oct 2009, Indian Aviation- In General Oct 2009