One local company, IndiGo, has risen to become Asia's fastest growing airline. Its president, Aditya Ghosh, had no airline experience before leading the airline, which in his view, is no bad thing.
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"That we are running an airline is incidental. What we set out to do was build a great business," he says.
It is more important to us to run a sharp business rather than try and plant flags everywhere and buy bigger planes.
Aditya Ghosh, president, IndiGo
Ghosh's business model has been deceptively simple.
His aim has been to run a low-cost airline with high standards, both in terms of cleanliness and reliability.
"The airlines that we were competing against were low-cost airlines that were synonymous with dirty planes, bad schedules, high numbers of cancellations... just chaotic, disorganized. So we set out with one objective: to prove that low cost is not low quality," he says.
Key in establishing a competitive brand has been making sure fights always run on time.
"I'm Indian, so I can say it: In India, being on time is not really everybody's priority. Six or seven years ago, trains used to run six or seven hours late. For flights, if you were 15 minutes or half an hour from your schedule time, there was nothing alarming about that," says Ghosh.
"We were these mavericks who said, 'On time is our thing.' If an IndiGo plane gets delayed by ten minutes, people are looking at their watches."
IndiGo's formula doesn't sound too complex, and one wonders why some of India's fledgling carriers haven't followed suit.
10/05/13 CNN.com
