The crisis at IndiGo that led to scores of flights being cancelled daily since early last week threw the country’s entire aviation ecosystem out of gear. The reason for that outsized impact is IndiGo’s sheer dominance of India’s aviation sector: the carrier accounted for six out of every 10 Indian passengers travelling by air on domestic sectors and it is, for all intended purposes, too big to fail.

The true extent of IndiGo’s stranglehold over India’s domestic aviation market goes well beyond its nearly 65 per cent domestic market share by passenger volumes and the mantle of the country’s largest airline. While India’s aviation sector is effectively a duopoly — with the Air India group having a market share of 26.5 per cent as of October — a bulk of IndiGo’s routes are monopoly route

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