FTA: In Indo-Canadian deal, aviation sector be made more inclusive
Ahmedabad: Josh Leslie, Canadian entrepreneur and the National Chair of Indo-Canadian Relations for Corporate Connections, has said that aviation sector’s huge potential should also be considered part of the proposed Indo-Canadian Free Trade Agreement (FTA).
The governments in Canada and India are working toward a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), including focus on goods, services, investment, and mobility.
But there is a structural bottleneck that threatens to limit the impact of any deal: the bilateral air services agreement governing where passenger flights between the two countries are permitted to operate, he said in a statement.
The current framework, expanded in November 2022, restricts direct commercial passenger air travel to just six named Indian cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata — and four named Canadian cities plus two additional points to be selected by India.
This constraint is already outdated. Since the agreement was signed, India has opened Navi Mumbai International Airport (December 2025) and inaugurated Noida International Airport at Jewar, UP, (March 2026) — neither of which is contemplated in the current bilateral. Uttar Pradesh alone now has five international airports, making it India’s leading state in this respect. Yet not one of them is authorized for direct passenger service to or from Canada.
India’s international airport count stands at nearly 35 and is projected to exceed 50 within the next five years. Its Vision 2040 targets 200 functional airports and anticipates 1.1 billion annual passengers. Canada, by contrast, has 13 designated international airports — a number that has been static and is not expected to grow.
The forthcoming FTA is the right vehicle to fix this bottleneck. Rather than renegotiating the bilateral agreement city by city — a process that would be perpetually behind India’s infrastructure expansion — the FTA should replace the current named-city model with a framework tied to each country’s own maintained list of international airports.
Canada and India have set ambitious targets for bilateral trade — projections suggest the FTA could drive goods and services trade to USD 50 billion by 2030. If the aviation framework remains frozen at six Indian cities and four Canadian ones, the FTA’s potential will be structurally constrained before it begins. The time to address this is now, while both governments are at the negotiating table.
(VP)
