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Indian airspace buzzes with first-time flyers as budget airlines stage a revolution

This article is more than 16 years old
Passengers leave the trains behind for fast, cheap but polluting travel by plane
in Bangalore
Mon 19 Sep 2005 20.32 EDT

With eyes fixed to the clouds outside his window, Manoj Kumar is trying to fasten his seat belt. After a struggle, the shopkeeper from Delhi explains that flight DN661 to Bangalore is his first. "I have never flown before," he says. "It is like being on a fairground ride."

Until recently, air travel across India was only for businessmen and women, foreign tourists, and visits home from the country's vast diaspora. Fares were prohibitively expensive and the middle class travelled on the British Raj's most visible legacy: the railways.

But a booming economy, a congested and crumbling train network and the emergence of low-cost carriers similar to Ryanair have meant a slice of Indian society taking to the skies for the first time. With half-a-dozen airlines planning to launch in the next year, fares have tumbled - and more than a third of the seats will be filled with first-time flyers. Three years ago a return ticket from New Delhi, India's capital, to Mumbai, the country's financial hub, was fixed at 20,000 rupees (£250). Now travellers who book online can get a ticket for 450 rupees. Also, towns which used to be connected only by slow train services or potholed highways, have been linked by a series of airstrips unused since the end of the second world war.

Behind this transformation of the aviation sector is Captain GR Gopinath, a former army officer who ran a private helicopter business in the early 90s. "I used to fly over small towns and villages and saw satellite dishes and TV aerials pop up on all these tiny houses," he said. "It told me that if people could afford to pay 5 rupees a day for television, then a new mindset was emerging. Rather than seeing India as a country with a billion people to be fed and subsidised, I saw 1 billion hungry consumers."

It was an advert that convinced him India was ready for take off. "We ran an advert which showed a girl on an island with a caption that said: 'If it's on the map we will get you there.' Then we kept on getting calls from people thinking we were an airline and wanting to book tickets. I realised then that India wanted to fly."

In 24 months, Air Deccan has revolutionised Indian air travel. Last year it carried 1 million passengers, this year that figure will reach 4.4 million. With 35 destinations, the fleet is already stretched and the company has ordered a further 62 aircraft.

Pilots' salaries are also airborne as new airlines try to secure experienced staff. Poaching is commonplace. "The best-paid pilots are working for the newest airline, SpiceJet," said Yajvendra Chaturvedi, a pilot with Air Sahara. "There the take-home pay is 340,000 rupees a month (£4,250). I have had a pay increase of 40% this year because we just don't have enough people with enough experience in India."

Despite this, most Indians have never been to an airport, let alone flown. This year 2% of the 1 billion population will fly on a domestic route - and for every air passenger there are 300 getting on a train. But analysts say this shows the enormity of the potential market.

"What you have in India is explosive growth fuelled by low-cost airlines," said Kapil Kaul of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Aviation. "We are seeing passenger numbers growing by 25% a year, which is an enormous change and challenge for a society unused to such mobility. There is no slowdown in sight and in five years we'll have 50 million domestic passengers. Not only will we need new airports, but another 600 new planes. It's a whole new world."

For some years, Indian airports have been regarded as the most decrepit in Asia. The government has announced an overhaul, particularly in New Delhi and Mumbai where they have already reached peak capacity. Billions of dollars have been put aside to build and upgrade airports in 30 cities.

In the country's hinterland there has been a scramble to attract airlines to smaller industrial centres, which say businesses will only relocate if there are decent transport links.

Officials in Dehra Dun, a city of 1.6 million people in the foothills of the Himalayas, said there had been an influx of business thanks to Air Deccan's daily hour-long flight to and from New Delhi.

"We have benefited immensely from the flights," says RS Tolia, the chief secretary of Uttaranchal state, of which Dehra Dun is the capital. "Now business people can come in the morning, do business in the afternoon and get back quickly. Really the only other alternative is a six-hour train ride. Now we need many more flights so that we can encourage tourism." This is music to Mr Gopinath's ears. He wants to sell to the masses, not the elite. Now a multimillionaire, he was educated in a local-language school in small-town southern India. He attributes his success to this humble beginning: the airline's logo is a bespectacled "common man". "I do not want to fly between the big cities," Mr Gopinath said. "The passengers will come from dozens of cities in India with half a million to 4 million people in them. That's where India lives and works, not in Mumbai and Delhi."

But not everyone is so pleased with the switch from train to plane. "For a country like ours that is basically poor and dependent on oil imports, there is no reason to shift to a more energy intensive mode of transport," said Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change and the director general of Teri, an environmental thinktank in Delhi.

Although India has a fraction of the flights available in the US, the rise in greenhouse emissions is a cause for concern. Rail travel produces two-thirds of the carbon dioxide emitted by planes. The 140-mile trip between Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, and Delhi, if made by airline, would see 57kg of CO2 sent into the upper atmosphere. The same journey by train produces 38kg.

"Really we should be modernising our railways so that the time taken by rail is comparable to airlines, especially on these shorter trips," said Dr Pachauri. "But there is no one ministry that deals with transport. So nobody weighs up the pros and cons between transport modes. No one is building a Japanese bullet train in India. Instead, our railways are fading away, rather like what happened in America in the 30s. I am afraid that we will end up looking like America where planes shuttle people between cities, rather than France or Japan where people take the train."