The great Indigo meltdown of early December during which India’s #1 airline which hitherto operated over 2,000 flights per day, cancelled 4,500 flights between December 4-10, leaving millions of passengers with reservations in the lurch, proved that the increasingly beautiful face of Indian capitalism still requires a lot of improvement.

Overarching emphasis on profit at the cost of brand-building — and a fight between promoters for full control — has proved to be the nemesis of the country’s new-hope civil airline. In 2023, the company placed a whopping order for 500 A320 wide-bodied passenger aircraft as a result of which its fleet strength crossed 400. However incredibly, it didn’t occur to its squabbling top management that more aircraft require more pilots. Consequently, currently the pilots-aircraft ratio of Indigo is 13:1 cf. Air India’s 26:1 and the global average of 20:1. Therefore, after the Union government’s new FDTL (flight duty time limitations) rules which made more rest and less night landing times for pilots mandatory for all airlines (following the dreadful crash of an Air India flight on take-off from Ahmedabad-London in June 2025), were promulgated (after two years advance notice) on November 1, the bottom-line obsessed Indigo management which was squeezing the maximum out of its pilots was caught flat-footed. Hence the mass cancellation of flights last month.

Yet the most depressing conclusion of this civil aviation imbroglio which has cost Indigo passengers millions in time and money lost, is that despite 80 years of mealy-mouth socialism — or perhaps because of it — India is a nation of price gougers. Immediately after Indigo cancelled thousands of flights in December, every airline, including Air India, now managed by the sanctimonious Tatas, raised airfares ten-fold to book windfall profits. And everyone else including road taxis, buses and railway employees joined the party to raise their fares sky-high and fleece desperate travellers.

In polite society, such brazen profiteering is widely condemned as price scalping/gouging. Yet in post-independence India with its faux socialism heritage, it’s accepted as normal, a virus that has blighted the face of Indian capitalism. Beyond a point, greed is not good.