‘India will hit a billion trips, overtake US’
NEWDELHI: Jayant Sinha is facing the difficult task of setting India’s national carrier right at a time when airlines are becoming unprofitable because of fuel prices and operating costs. At the same time, however, the aviation industry is booming, and India is among the fastgrowing markets in the world. Sinha spoke to and about the future of Indian aviation, safety concerns over flying, and the Opposition coming together ahead of the 2019 general elections, among other key issues. Edited excerpts:
Faizan Haider Saubhadra Chatterji
pilot turned up drunk, another skipped the medical test. There are some other incidents as well involving the national carrier.
The aviation system and air transport are the safest means of long-distance transport in the world. Air travel is extremely safe; nonetheless, every system will have a certain number of incidents and events. The volume of flights has gone up dramatically in India - as the volume goes up, statistically, you will end up having a certain number of incidents and events.
We monitor this very, very closely – both in terms of number of incidents and see whether it is within acceptable zone or not, and we also look at all of the safety practices and compliance efforts by the different airlines. Whether we look at it in terms of incident statistics, or in terms of compliance and safety practices, we are very much within the safety zone. are growing faster than the long-term average. We are seeing that this calendar year we will do roughly 225-230 million passenger trips. But if we continue to grow even at the longterm average, in the next 15-20 years, we are going to reach a billion trips a year.
By way of comparison, China is at about 600 million trips a year and the US is at about 900 million trips a year. China is growing at about 8-9% a year and the US is going at about 3% a year. I think we will surpass the US, of course China will continue to grow strongly and will become the number one market in the world; we are likely to become the number two market in the world, right next to the US.
We have in place the NABH (Next generation airports of Bharat) Nirman programme and we have sufficient airport capacity to be able to handle a billion trips in the next 15-20 years. And in support of that, we see an investment pipeline of about ~1 lakh crore over the next five years between Brownfield and Greenfield expansions. policy reforms in the pipeline.
Other governments have undertaken policy reforms but then they have suffered in terms of growth; other governments have had growth but neither undertaken policy reforms nor been able to manage macroeconomics. The reason we are in this extraordinary sweet spot is because we are delivering on reforms, we are delivering on macroeconomy and we are delivering as far as the people are concerned.