Jyotiraditya Scindia, Union Minister of Civil Aviation and Steel, spoke exclusively to Business Today magazine and revealed 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
Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said, “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… On a sustained basis, the average numbers have been between 390,000-440,000 every day.”
“Our international passengers have gone up to 60 million [from 43 million in FY14]. And I see the 144 million plus 60 million, which is roughly 200 million [passengers], doubling over the next five years. That’s the kind of explosive growth that we are talking about,” said Jyotiraditya Scindia, Union Minister for Civil Aviation
Jyotiraditya Scindia spoke of a new conundrum that has cropped up due to increased demands. He said, “Whereas we didn’t have passengers to fly in planes, today, within India, we don’t have enough planes to fly the number of passengers that we need [to]. Therefore, what we have done from a regulatory standpoint is to make the policy for leased aircraft far more flexible.”
“Our effort is that as airlines increase their fleet size, the civil aviation ecosystem gets supplanted. We are... in conversation with airports and airlines to look at key learnings internationally and flatten out the vicissitudes of arrivals and departures, to smoothen out that curve to provide a greater level of connectivity between their domestic and international flights,” said Jyotiraditya Scindia
“We must venture into the international markets; we must eventually move into long-haul markets and provide point-to-point travel for our domestic fliers internationally‚ to ensure that we attract them to our carriers as opposed to them going via hubs lying outside the country,” added the Civil Aviation Minister on creating more domestic hubs
Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has sought an audit of airport assets to reduce Indian aviation’s carbon footprint. “As far as the airports segment is concerned, 11 airports in the private sector and close to 96 airports of AAI will be completely carbon-neutral by the second quarter of 2025. That’s the plan that we have in place and I’m personally monitoring it,” said Scindia
Talking about the success of the government’s Rs 6,220-crore production-linked incentive scheme for the manufacture of specialty steel, Union Steel Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said, “We are very happy with the buoyancy and the bullishness that the PLI for steel has received… Although we are still in the early days of the first PLI scheme, we are certainly thinking of PLI 2.0.”