Penalty on IndiGo and Air Safety

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has rightly decided to impose INR 22 crore penalty on IndiGo, considering the fact that the unprecedented aviation chaos experienced in early December last year, was not caused by natural events, geopolitical tensions or unavoidable technical faults, but rather due to bad management. A close scrutiny of the situation will prove that such a situation could easily be avoided if the IndiGo management had not shown unusual knack of squeezing every possible minute of productivity, compromising with the air safety and showing utter disregard to the rules meant for passenger safety. Hopefully, after the imposition of such a huge penalty, not only IndiGo, but also other airlines will strictly follow the rules attaching top most priority to safety, discarding the practice of running after profit only.

Before proceeding further, it must be mentioned here that at present, IndiGo is the largest airline in the country having a pan-India footprint. Over the years, the airline has grown in such a big manner that it has almost established a monopolistic presence on the Indian skies. Perhaps encouraged by this success, the IndiGo management has gone all out to maximize the profit by maximizing the duty hours of its pilots, cabin crews and ground staff, willfully overlooking the international norm of providing adequate rest to the staff to make air travel safe, which is applicable to all associated with the aviation industry. This is why when the government had firmly asked the airlines to strictly adhere to the newly framed rule to ensure safety, IndiGo was clearly caught off guard as it didn’t have the necessary number of pilots, cabin crew and ground staff to meet the requirements of the new regulations.

The said airline erred by taking the dateline set by the government lightly, hoping that its prayer to extend it would be granted without much trouble. This is why they went ahead with bookings ignoring the fact that it would not be able to operate flights with the present strength after the dateline. This is exactly what happened during December last year, when IndiGo was forced to cancel record numbers of flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. Considering the trouble that the people had gone through at that time, it can be argued that the IndiGo should be asked to pay a bigger amount of money, setting an example to the offenders that they would have to pay a heavy price for showing any disrespect to the rules and regulations.

In this context, it should also be mentioned that the said chaos has affected the Northeastern states more than the mainland states as many Northeasterners who live in other parts of the country prefer to be with their families and friends during the festive time. Many of them had to reschedule their trip or to cancel all together, as taking advantage of the situation other airlines had adopted surge pricing policy which made the air fare abnormally high. So apart from financially punishing IndiGo, DGCA should also take steps to prevent any such occurrences in the future.