Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Dec 6: The government is likely to seek the removal of IndiGo’s Chief Executive officer (CEO) Pieter Elbers over massive disruptions of flight schedules causing massive harassment to passengers and creating chaotic conditions at several airports across the country.
Sources said on Saturday that after the airline’s chaotic handling of the new rules for pilots’ rest hours led to mass cancellations and stranded tens of thousands of passengers across the country, an unprecedented crackdown on the airline was on the cards.
The speculation gained momentum after the aviation ministry summoned IndiGo’s officials on Saturday. A heavy financial penalty is also being weighed on the budget carrier that commands nearly two-thirds of the domestic market share, sources added.
Officials said the government was preparing to impose a heavy, possibly an exemplary, penalty on the IndiGo for the operational meltdown that has triggered widespread delays, cancellations and passenger chaos across the country.
In view of the chaos created by the airlines due to shortage of pilots, the government was also considering “culling” IndiGo’s number of flights it operates daily. The airlines would now be permitted to operate as many flights as it can provide full staff complete amidst allegations that the airlines was operating overstretched schedule, officials said signalling the toughest action yet against India’s largest airline.
India’s aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu had yesterday confirmed that action would be taken against IndiGo, though he didn’t go into the details. A high-level inquiry into the crisis has already been ordered. Naidu said action would follow the inquiry. “There will be action because this is not something that we want to entertain. We are very clear that the focus of the ministry is the passenger,” he had said.
Elbers had earlier admitted that his airline failed to live up to its promise of providing a good experience to its customers. In a public apology, he acknowledged that yesterday was the “most severely impacted day,” with over a thousand cancellations. This made it clear that the airline was at fault, Naidu said, pointing out that no other airline faced any problem in implementing the new Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) as IndiGo did.
IndiGo has been struggling to operate on domestic routes after misjudging the number of pilots that it needed under the revised FDTL rules brought in by the aviation regulator to ensure longer rest periods for the pilots. Over a thousand of flights were cancelled yesterday and hundreds more since this morning, stranding passengers at airports with no option but to shell out extra bucks for last-minute bookings on other airlines. Many had to cancel their travel plans. The government has now put the FDTL order in abeyance, expecting that normalcy would return within three days.
Many opposition leaders had been demanding the government take stringent action against the private carrier for causing passenger harassment. Communist Party of India (CPI) General Secretary D. Raja on Saturday criticised the IndiGo flight cancellations that left thousands of passengers stranded nationwide, and said the situation shows how allowing one company to dominate the airline sector creates problems for travellers.
Mr Raja said, “This should be a lesson for the government and the people that if you allow monopoly companies to emerge, this is what we experience. The price of airline tickets are increasing, how will passengers face this situation? Government should own the responsibility for such a crisis in the country.”
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP-SP) Lok Sabha MP Supriya Sule sought action against IndiGo airline for hundreds of flight cancellations over the past five days that has severely distressed thousands of passengers across the nation. “The Union Government must take action against IndiGo. Thousands of people have faced difficulties in the last two days. We have raised this issue in Parliament,” Ms Sule said.
“Such large-scale disruption without any prior information has caused loss of time and crores of rupees. We did not expect this from IndiGo. The Centre must create five more companies like IndiGo and share details in Parliament about why IndiGo’s service collapsed and what the solutions are,” Ms Sule said.
Congress MP Sasikanth Senthil slammed the BJP for manufacturing a “duopoly” in the aviation sector, causing the current Indigo crisis. Criticising the DGCA for waiving the new pilots rest rules, he said, “This is not just irresponsible; it is outrageous. By scrapping rules specifically designed to prevent pilot fatigue, the BJP government has allegedly jeopardised passenger safety and thrown the well-being of cockpit crew into uncertainty.”
He asked, “Why did the DGCA fail to ensure IndiGo complied with the FDTL rules released in January 2024 and partially implemented from July 2025 and fully on 1 November 2025? Did the government ever issue warnings or compliance notices to IndiGo, or was the airline protected from enforcement altogether?”
Former Union Minister and Congress leader P Chidambaram described the widespread flight cancellations, especially of IndiGo, as a consequence of what he termed a duopolistic market. In a post on X on Saturday morning, the Congress veteran backed the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, who had on various occasions opposed duopoly in businesses. “Mr Rahul Gandhi was spot on when he said that the monopoly/duopoly model is ill-suited for a developing country,” Mr Chidambaram wrote on X. Duopoly prevails in many sectors of the Indian economy; the airline industry was one, the veteran Congress leader said.
The Telangana Congress MP Mallu Ravi wrote to the Civil Aviation Minister flagging what he described as severe and unprecedented turmoil in India’s aviation sector following the carrier’s massive operational breakdown. In his letter, Mr Ravi warned that the situation had exposed structural vulnerabilities within the aviation ecosystem and highlighted the risks of overreliance on a single dominant private airline.
“It is to bring to your immediate attention the serious and unprecedented disruptions currently affecting India’s aviation sector. The recent developments have exposed critical vulnerabilities that demand urgent corrective measures from the Government of India,” he wrote.
In view of the flight disruptions, the Indian Railways has stepped in to help passengers stranded at various airports across the country. At the national level, Indian Railways has announced to augment a total of 37 trains with 116 additional coaches, operating over 114 augmented trips across the network to meet the travel demand. As per a PIB release, the decision was taken to ensure smooth travel and to provide adequate accommodation to stranded and waiting passengers as air travel disruptions led to a sudden surge in rail bookings.
Northern Railway has stepped in to ease passenger woes by adding extra coaches to popular services and running special trains to high-demand destinations. Northern Railway Chief Public Relations Officer (CPRO) Himanshu Shekhar Upadhyay said the zone has attached additional coaches to key Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains and introduced special services to Sabarmati, Mumbai, Howrah, Patna, Darbhanga, and Thiruvananthapuram to address the surge in travel demand.
The South Central Railway on Saturday announced that it would run four special trains to manage the surge in passengers resulting from the large-scale cancellation of IndiGo flights. The move comes as flyers face significant disruption and long queues at the airport due to the cancellation. A press release from the SCR said it was running the special trains to clear the extra rush of passengers to Chennai, Mumbai and Shalimar (Kolkata) from Hyderabad.
The Central Railway announced it would run six special trains on key long-distance routes on December 6 and 7 to clear the extra rush of passengers due to widespread flight cancellations across the country. CR chief public relations officer Swapnil Nila said the special services would be operated on Pune-SMVT Bengaluru (Dec 6), Pune-New Delhi (Dec 7), Lokmanya Tilak Terminus-Madgaon (Dec 7), Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus-New Delhi (Dec 6), Lokmanya Tilak Terminus-Lucknow (Dec 6) and Nagpur-CSMT (Dec 6) routes to clear extra rush of passengers.
