No country in the world buys as many aircraft as India. The largest airlines have ordered nearly a thousand jets this year, investing tens of billions of dollars in spending unprecedented in aviation. In New Delhi, Indira Gandhi International Airport will be ready for 109 million passengers next year as it prepares to become the world’s second busiest after Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in the United States.
And this is happening in a vast country that is still heavily dependent on trains – with twenty journeys by rail by plane.
The massive aviation expansion, followed by a wave of investments, has a place of honor in India’s case for a greater position on the world stage. As the country climbs the ranks of the world’s largest economies, India is trying to meet the growing aspirations of its rising middle class. The airports are showing very visible results.
Air travel remains out of the financial reach of most Indians. An estimated 3 percent of the country’s population flies regularly. But in a country of 1.4 billion people, that percentage represents 42 million: executives, students and engineers eager to get from here to there quickly within India’s borders, and to have easier access to destinations beyond, for business travelers alike as holidaymakers.
Kapil Kaul, the CEO of CAPA India, an aviation consultancy, calls “the next two to three years critical to achieving the quality of growth that India wants and deserves.” The growth has so far been fruitless. Now Indian aviation must prove that it can make money.
The effects of the spending spree should be replicated across the Indian economy. Freight goes hand in hand with passenger traffic, and foreign investment often follows closely behind, Kaul said.
Arrivals at the international terminal at Indira Gandhi Airport are greeted by a wall of giant sculptural hands, their fingers and palms folded into the meaningful shapes of the Buddha’s gestures, looking both ancient and futuristic. When they were installed in 2012, 30 million passengers passed through the airport. By the time the airport reaches its new capacity, a new airport will have been built from the ground up on the other side of the city.
Indira Gandhi Airport is rushing to get bigger. In July, a fourth runway was added and an elevated taxiway opened. The company that operates it, GMR Airports, took over in 2006, a time when all arrivals walked past cows lazing in the dust to reach a taxi rank. In 2018, the facility was rated as India’s most valuable infrastructure asset. To save the use of aviation fuel, a battery-powered TaxiBot tows stationary aircraft over the tarmac. An automated baggage handling system can sort 6,000 bags per hour.
Two beneficiaries of the growing Indian aviation market are the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers: Boeing in America and Airbus in Europe. In February, Air India, which the Tata Group took private last year, agreed to buy 250 planes from Airbus and 220 from Boeing, worth a combined $70 billion. In June, IndiGo, the country’s largest airline by passengers and flights, ordered 500 new Airbus A230s.
Most of the growth in Indian aviation has come from domestic airlines, which have seen a 36 percent increase in passenger numbers since 2022. The number of foreign tourists has recovered since the pandemic, but is still relatively scarce and barely exceeds 10 million in a good year. about the same as Romania). Therefore, low-cost airlines are adding new countries to their destinations to cater to India’s demand for foreign tourism. Azerbaijan, Kenya and Vietnam can all be reached directly from Delhi or Mumbai, India’s financial capital, for less than 21,000 rupees, or $250 one way.
The air corridor between Delhi and Mumbai was already one of the ten busiest in the world. Like Delhi, Mumbai has new airport terminals that would be the envy of any city in America, not to mention the glorious new all-bamboo Terminal 2 at Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru, a city in southern India. But infrastructure expansion is not limited to the country’s major urban areas.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is keen to point out that the number of airports has doubled in the nine years since he took office, from 74 to 148. Jyotiraditya Scindia, Modi’s aviation minister, said there will be at least 230 by 2030. The government has invested more than $11 billion in airports over the past decade, and Mr Scindia has promised another $15 billion.
That means sleepy towns like Darbhanga, a former principality in the impoverished state of Bihar in eastern India, now have non-stop access to Delhi, Bengaluru and beyond. For many of the 900 daily travelers who fill the flights, including many from nearby Nepal, the new airport has transformed the journey.
Prasanna Kumar Jha, 52, was born in Darbhanga but works in Delhi as a tax consultant. “Who would have ever expected Darbhanga to be on the sky map?” he asked. Flying to his hometown at short notice to see his ailing mother cost him 10,500 rupees ($126), which was tight.
“But if you calculate the alternative – by train from Delhi and then by taxi to Darbhanga – it will take at least 30 hours,” he said. “Air travel is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.”
Darbhanga airport is far away from New Delhi’s. There is no parking. Passengers walk from the edge of a highway past a checkpoint to wait on benches outside the terminal. Then they wait at another set of outdoor benches after going through security. But it works.
Another passenger on the same flight at Darbhanga, Ajay Jha, cradled his 1-year-old daughter Saranya as he stood at the rudimentary baggage carousel. His family was on the final leg of a journey that started in Bellevue, Washington, where he works as an engineer for Amazon, to a family reunion in rural Bihari. Traveling halfway around the world took less time than Mr Jha used to take to get home from his school in Bengaluru.
Yet a large majority of Indians cannot afford such conveniences. The annual average income is still less than a single economy class fare from the United States, and in this top-heavy economy, most Indians earn much less than that. Middle class in Indian parlance means somewhere near the top of the pyramid.
A report by CAPA India, the aviation analytics firm, counted just 0.13 passenger seats per capita for Indians in 2019, compared to 0.52 for Chinese and 3.03 for Americans. But aviation companies and elected officials in India look at the low penetration and see opportunity.
A lack of competition, in the face of an emerging duopoly between IndiGo and the Tata-led airlines, is one of the salient features of the new landscape. Smaller competitors continue to go bankrupt, most recently Go First, which filed for bankruptcy in May. A pilot shortage, after dozens were poached by larger companies, forced Akasa Air, a promising newcomer, to cancel flights in August.
But supply shortages are not the worst problem in today’s global economy. With aviation growth holding steady at around 15 percent per year in the decade before the pandemic, the Indian boom seems all but guaranteed to change the future of aviation globally. If the benefits for the winners of the Indian economy can be persuaded to trickle outwards and downwards, the same could be true for many other sectors.