The true extent of IndiGo’s monopoly on Indian skies

IndiGo, the largest airline in India, may have a 64 per cent domestic market share but its spread is much, much larger than that. In July, India will see airlines operating in 1,131 sectors in the country (Mumbai-Delhi-Mumbai are counted as two). IndiGo flies to 900 of these, a whopping 79.6 per cent of all routes in India.

Air India Express, which under the government was restricted largely to international shores, comes in next with 247 routes in India. Air India, after effecting a 5 per cent cut on domestic routes and 15 per cent on international recently, flies to 159 routes. 

Data shared by Cirium, an aviation analytics company, exclusively for this article, shows that a staggering number of routes in India are monopoly routes. 

The monopoly

Even as the country debates a duopoly in Indian skies, one aspect that has largely gone unnoticed is IndiGo’s monopoly. Of the 900 routes that it operates, IndiGo has a monopoly on 514 routes. That translates to over 57 per cent of the routes running as a monopoly.

The word monopoly has negative connotations, but another way of looking at it is that, had it not been for IndiGo, passengers would not have any connectivity on these routes.

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Overall, of the 1,131 routes, 737 see only one operator. The flip side is that there is a loss of service when that operator exits that route. In essence, nearly 70 per cent of all routes in India are monopoly routes.

IndiGo is not the only carrier which flies monopoly routes. Alliance Air, the only government-owned airline in India, is the sole operator in 80, or 62.5 per cent, of its 128 routes. This is largely because of the airline flying many RCS-UDAN routes.

At third place in the monopoly sweepstakes is regional carrier Star Air, which also has a big play in the RCS-UDAN segment. It has 50, or 70 per cent, of the total 71 routes as a monopoly. The other two regional carriers, IndiaOne and Fly91, also have a very high proportion of monopoly routes, with IndiaOne operating 14 out of 15 routes and Fly91 16 of 21 routes as a monopoly.

The Air India group sees fewer monopoly routes as it focuses its expansion on major routes. That leaves it with just 16 out of 159 routes as a monopoly. Subsidiary Air India Express has 28 out of 247 routes as a monopoly. Akasa Air has just two monopoly routes while SpiceJet has 11. 

Monopoly breakers

There are 249 routes in Indian skies, which are operated by two airlines. The real competition here is between IndiGo and Air India Express— on 125 of these routes. On 63 of the duopoly routes, the competing airlines are IndiGo and Air India. 

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There are only seven routes amongst the duopoly routes where IndiGo is not present. SpiceJet, which was once fighting tooth and nail with IndiGo, is not to be seen amongst these majors while Akasa Air is competing in a duopoly with IndiGo on some major sectors, including the ones with slot constraints. 

Tail Note

There are 10 airline operators in India currently, and the maximum number of airlines that any route sees is only half of that. There are only six sectors where five airlines operate. These are Mumbai—Delhi—Mumbai, the busiest in the country; Delhi – Bengaluru – Delhi, the second busiest. Bengaluru – Hyderabad – Bengaluru, Mumbai – Ahmedabad – Mumbai, Delhi – Pune – Delhi and Mumbai – Varanasi – Mumbai. 

Indian aviation has been growing at a breakneck pace in terms of aircraft induction. However, the capacity growth has not been exactly in line with the orders which have been placed. This is because of the supply chain constraints worldwide impacting deliveries and groundings which are taking time to recover. As more and more aircraft get delivered, the expansion of Indian carriers will gain momentum on both domestic and international routes. The large number of airports in the works will see many more monopoly routes coming into operation. Perhaps, monopoly isn’t essentially bad.