'We don't have enough planes to fly all domestic passengers'
Business Today India|May 14, 2023
Jyotiraditya Scindia, Union Minister of Civil Aviation and Steel, reveals why there has been a surfeit of aviation orders from India, the government's plans for the sector, and the road to carbon neutrality
Manish Pant
'We don't have enough planes to fly all domestic passengers'

He is among a handful of Cabinet Ministers to have been publicly praised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for their achievements. As a minister handling the important portfolios of civil aviation and steel, 52-year-old Jyotiraditya Scindia has a clear mandate: to tap into the enormous potential of the two sectors to drive their growth. In an exclusive interview with Business Today’s Manish Pant, Scindia explains why there has been a surfeit of aviation orders from India, the government’s ambitious plans to turn the world’s fastest-growing aviation market into a global hub and make the sector carbon-neutral, and the extension of PLI 2.0 to the steel sector. Edited excerpts:

Q: Are you satisfied with the way India’s aviation sector has recovered after the Covid-19 pandemic?

A: The civil aviation sector in India is on a resurgent high. Where two years ago we had all our planes on the ground and not a single passenger, today we have all our planes in the air, and there is a sustained increase in [passenger] demand. We experienced a pre-Covid-19 high of roughly 420,000 passengers per day in October of 2019. Surprisingly, post the October-January high season, we are experiencing new highs with close to 455,000 passengers [per day] in February. And the important thing is that it’s not a blip. On a sustained basis, the average numbers have been between 390,000-440,000 every day.

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