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NEW DELHI, March 21 (Reuters) – India’s setback foreign airlines hope India’s aviation minister on Tuesday urged domestic airlines to fly long-haul and help build new hubs in a bid to wrest control of Indian tourism from foreign rivals.
Jyotiraditya Scindia told Reuters it was also asking aerospace firms to step up local production and would soon finalize rules to safeguard lessors’ rights to take back jets, in line with major global aviation markets.
“India is now at that inflection point,” Sindia said in an interview at his office in New Delhi.
“In the next few years, we will see a surge in air traffic in India,” he said, adding that he wanted domestic airlines to focus more on international expansion.
The South Asian country is one of the fastest-growing aviation markets in the world, with demand for air travel outstripping supply of planes, but much of the international traffic is carried by global airlines with efficient hubs.
Now, India hopes to capitalize on these economic gains by boosting the development of its airlines and airports.
Air India placed a Record 470 jets were ordered and aggressively entered the international market.Domestic rival IndiGo also in talks for new order for more than 500 planes, Reuters Report Earlier this month, even it was waiting to pick up the same number of shipments from an old order.
Scindia said India is not considering increasing air traffic quotas with the Gulf states, but instead wants Indian airlines to offer direct long-haul flights with larger aircraft. Air India’s orders for wide-body jets and IndiGo’s twin-aisle jets flying to some destinations are signs that a “transition” has begun, he said.
India is also mobilizing to meet the transport needs of its 1.3 billion population by building new airports in the country’s most remote areas and expanding the capacity of major airports.
Domestic and international passenger traffic through the six major metro airports is expected to more than double to 420 million in the next five years, and India’s fleet will grow to more than 2,000 planes from 700 today, Scindia said.
He is working with a number of airlines and Delhi Airport to create a hub-and-spoke model in the capital, allowing passengers to seamlessly transition from domestic to international connections and vice versa.
“Today, my hub is on the eastern border or the western border of our country. At my scale, I have to have a hub inside India,” Sindia said.
But even with hundreds of new planes on order and India’s history of airline failures such as Kingfisher and Jet Airways, Scindia said he wasn’t concerned about any oversupply because of the country’s economy, rapid urbanization and aviation Underpenetration of the travel market will support growth.
“Before, airports and planes would fly only to those cities with strong economic growth to justify investment. Today, airports and airlines are determining economic growth,” the 52-year-old minister said.
“The whole paradigm has changed.”
Reporting by Aditi Shah and Tim Hepher; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Mark Potter
Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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