It takes less than an hour to fly from Guwahati to Aizawl. But come February 10, it will be near impossible to reach the Mizoram capital from Guwahati in less than 15 hours because the solitary direct air connection between the two cities will cease to exist. It could take up to a day to make the journey by air, with layovers at either Delhi or Kolkata, or in some cases, both.
There is no railway link between the two cities. Road travel is an option, but the 470 km distance on a serpentine, and in parts, broken highway, takes almost 15 hours to traverse.
According to the existing airline schedule, on February 10, the shortest flight time between the two cities – separated by an aerial distance of 280 km – will be over 16 hours with a stop at Kolkata. It is possible to fly from Delhi to San Francisco – 12,000 km away as the crow flies – in less time.
The termination of the sole Guwahati-Aizawl connection has come because of Jet Airways’s decision to suspend all operations in the North East except for flights from Guwahati to other parts of the country. While the move was triggered by the airline’s financial woes, it is yet another setback to air connectivity within the region. The Modi government’s promises of a turnaround in this sector have not been realised.
Nowhere is the failure more evident than the government’s flagship regional connectivity scheme, UDAAN – an acronym for the Hindi phrase “Ude Desh Ka Aam Naagrik”, which loosely translates into “Let the common man fly”.
The scheme, launched in 2017, is intended to put smaller cities on India’s air map by way of fiscal incentives, infrastructure support, procedural simplifications and monetary subsidies. The North East, infamous for some of the worst roads in India and a patchy railway network, was particularly expected to benefit from this.
The airport in Shillong, Meghalaya’s picturesque capital and one of the North East’s most popular tourist destinations, was the only airport in the North East to be chosen in the first phase of the scheme. The Hyderabad-based Air Deccan won exclusive rights to connect it to Aizawl, Agartala, Silchar, Dimapur and Imphal. But Airport Authority of India records reveal that the carrier only operated flights to Agartala and Dimapur for a total of 10 days from May 1 to May 10 in 2018.
Following the suspension of services by Air Deccan, Shillong’s air connectivity is now back to status quo: a lone Air India-operated daily flight to Kolkata, which travellers describe as “uncertain”. “The flight gets cancelled so often that I have started avoiding it,” said frequent flier Patricia Mukhim, the editor of Shillong Times.
When the second leg of the scheme was launched in November 2017, the Ministry of Civil Aviation announced the opening of 92 new air routes in the North East. Six airports – Rupsi, Jorhat, Lilabari and Tezpur in Assam, and Tezu and Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh – and 12 routes, were lapped up by bidders.
03/02/19 Scroll.in
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There is no railway link between the two cities. Road travel is an option, but the 470 km distance on a serpentine, and in parts, broken highway, takes almost 15 hours to traverse.
According to the existing airline schedule, on February 10, the shortest flight time between the two cities – separated by an aerial distance of 280 km – will be over 16 hours with a stop at Kolkata. It is possible to fly from Delhi to San Francisco – 12,000 km away as the crow flies – in less time.
The termination of the sole Guwahati-Aizawl connection has come because of Jet Airways’s decision to suspend all operations in the North East except for flights from Guwahati to other parts of the country. While the move was triggered by the airline’s financial woes, it is yet another setback to air connectivity within the region. The Modi government’s promises of a turnaround in this sector have not been realised.
Nowhere is the failure more evident than the government’s flagship regional connectivity scheme, UDAAN – an acronym for the Hindi phrase “Ude Desh Ka Aam Naagrik”, which loosely translates into “Let the common man fly”.
The scheme, launched in 2017, is intended to put smaller cities on India’s air map by way of fiscal incentives, infrastructure support, procedural simplifications and monetary subsidies. The North East, infamous for some of the worst roads in India and a patchy railway network, was particularly expected to benefit from this.
The airport in Shillong, Meghalaya’s picturesque capital and one of the North East’s most popular tourist destinations, was the only airport in the North East to be chosen in the first phase of the scheme. The Hyderabad-based Air Deccan won exclusive rights to connect it to Aizawl, Agartala, Silchar, Dimapur and Imphal. But Airport Authority of India records reveal that the carrier only operated flights to Agartala and Dimapur for a total of 10 days from May 1 to May 10 in 2018.
Following the suspension of services by Air Deccan, Shillong’s air connectivity is now back to status quo: a lone Air India-operated daily flight to Kolkata, which travellers describe as “uncertain”. “The flight gets cancelled so often that I have started avoiding it,” said frequent flier Patricia Mukhim, the editor of Shillong Times.
When the second leg of the scheme was launched in November 2017, the Ministry of Civil Aviation announced the opening of 92 new air routes in the North East. Six airports – Rupsi, Jorhat, Lilabari and Tezpur in Assam, and Tezu and Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh – and 12 routes, were lapped up by bidders.
03/02/19 Scroll.in
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