IndiGo crisis: Minister says government 'stepped in immediately' to cap air fares; adds prices are on par globally

NEW DELHI: Amid the ongoing concerns over the exponential rise in airfares due to the IndiGo crisis, aviation minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu on Friday said that the prices of flight tickets are on par with the rest of the world and that the government has taken steps to bring down prices during extraordinary times.While speaking in the Lok Sabha, the civil aviation minister said that even though the aviation sector is deregulated, the government observes the necessity to interfere and use its powers to cap fares while keeping market deregulation intact."The whole idea of open sky is there to keep the competition alive. Whenever it is necessary to interfere, the government has used its power. Recently, we saw during the IndiGo crisis that there were many cancellations, many routes where the airline was not able to operate due to which there was a capacity constraint," Naidu said."It was observed that if we didn’t interfere, there could be a rise in airfares. So immediately we stepped in, released an order and, this time, we made categories based on distance and clearly communicated to the airlines that there has to be a capping in airfares," he added.This comes days after the government imposed airfare caps, for the first time after Covid pandemic, as the IndiGo crisis had led to airfares surging exponentially.

The aviation ministry said that it has “taken a serious note of unusually high airfares being charged by certain airlines during the ongoing disruption” and that it has “invoked its regulatory powers to ensure fair and reasonable fares across all affected routes” to “protect passengers from any form of opportunistic pricing.”These caps will remain in force until IndiGo operations are back to pre-crisis levels.Under the new cap, airlines cannot charge more than:

The ministry clarified that these limits exclude applicable UDF, PSF and taxes, and will not apply to Business Class or RCS-UDAN flights.