Foreign airlines may not get to expand in India

In what could spoil expansion plans of carriers like Emirates and Qatar in India, the aviation ministry is planning to slap a freeze on allowing more flights to these carriers under the bilateral agreement.

?Most of these carriers have already fully utilised their traffic rights under the bilateral agreements, whereas our domestic carriers have not been able to utilise even 50% of it. Why should we allow foreign airlines to increase more flights unless our carriers are not benefitted,? Ajit Singh, civil aviation minister told Financial Express.

The Indian carriers including Air India, Jet Airways, Kingfisher and now the low-cost carriers like SpiceJet and IndiGo which have recently added some flights to Middle East, utilise only marginal traffic rights. The proposed freeze would be to bring parity between the flights being flown by the foreign airlines and domestic airlines under a particular bilateral agreement. For example, on Qatar route, Indian carriers utilise only 28% of the permitted flights. For Dubai, they fly up to 62% of the allowed capacity.

In countries like Australia, Kenya, Turkey where the bilateral agreement allows domestic airlines to fly upto 8,531, 5,600 and 5,600 seats, the carriers are flying none.On routes like Malaysia, China, the utilization of bilateral traffic rights is 12% and 6%. While, the Indian carriers are struggling to increase their frequencies internationally, airlines such as Emirates, Qatar, Turkish have already requested the Indian aviation authorises to allow more flights.

Even a consultation paper released by the aviation ministry recommends that the foreign carriers’ request for further opening up access has to be limited until a point has reached where the Indian carriers have fully utilised the underserved bilateral agreements, and/or have acquired the same access to the country that is requesting the bilateral.

Singh said, the decision would be taken based on the kind of traffic being flown between the countries. ?If we see that extending the bilateral would help Indian carriers expand their operations and gain more traffic on a particular route, we would certainly consider it,? he said.