Rooting for a handful of sky
International travel, as we have hitherto known it, is dead. Ever so often — weekly, sometimes more frequently — foreign embassies and high commissions in New Delhi are announcing changes to restrictions on the entry of Indians into their countries.
On March 28, new rules on the entry of airline passengers into Germany went into effect. The German government specifically said the new restrictions applied to what the order described as ‘Covid-19 risk countries, such as India’. The French government updated its February 4 order on March 1, warning that ‘all international travel – from a foreign country to France and vice versa – is totally and strictly discouraged until further orders’.
The consular section of the Embassy of Mexico in India is only entertaining visa applicants already holding a valid permit issued by the Department of National Migration in Mexico City. For many high commissions such as Canada, repatriation of their citizens from India became all-consuming work. Everything else became secondary as Canadian MPs intervened to speed up the repatriation. At one time, they had 38,000 Canadian citizens in India, desperate to go back home.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told Parliament two weeks ago that authorities facilitated the return from India of more than 1.1 lakh foreign passport holders. They came from 120 countries. None of this was fun travel. It has changed into an experience of unimaginable stress during the pandemic.
Minister for Civil Aviation Hardeep Singh Puri said a week ago that India had brought back 6.77 million of its citizens since its global repatriation mission known as ‘Vande Bharat’ began on May 7. While such flights may not be the coming home experience that they used to be, Puri says it has become the ‘world’s largest mission of hope and happiness’. It has certainly grown into the ‘largest repatriation exercise in the history of the world’ through aviation.
It is disconcerting that the numbers of returning Indians continue to grow. If it were not for a slow but steady revival in the migration of Indians who had to abandon their jobs abroad or lost work in the last one year, this would be a serious problem in terms of remittances to India and its foreign exchange reserves. Such return of Indians to their jobs is mostly true of the Gulf, where recovery is faster than in other parts of the world.
If oil prices continue to rise in the international market, more Indians will go back to the Gulf. But for them, too, travel is no longer a matter of joy. ‘To that end, our government has concluded air transport bubbles that are temporary reciprocal arrangements for commercial passenger services until the resumption of regular international flights. Such arrangements have been concluded with 27 nations so far,’ Jaishankar said.
As a result of all this, negotiations on civil aviation have turned into a major preoccupation for foreign diplomats. Ambassadors have had to brush up their knowledge of International Civil Aviation Organisation regulations and pore through the history of civil aviation agreements concluded by their countries and India. Along the way, these envoys have realised that only political interventions in New Delhi can get their national carriers anything like a fair deal in these negotiations.
It would not be far-fetched to predict that for the rest of this year, the big challenge facing foreign governments in their interactions with Indian counterparts will be in civil aviation. The pie is big, and getting bigger by the day. Every country with a global airline of its own wants a share of it. So far, Puri and his team have been tough in bargaining for the best deal for India in these negotiations to the point of causing frictions in several bilateral relations. It is a sea change from the previous government when the Civil Aviation Ministry was headed, for the most part, by a member of the Nationalist Congress Party. It still rankles in Rajiv Gandhi Bhavan, headquarters of this ministry, that seats were given away to foreign airlines without protecting the interests of Indian carriers or Indian ancillary businesses.
Ten years ago, order books of Boeing, Airbus and Embraer were full of orders from Indian carriers, both state-run airlines and private companies, which brought fresh air into Indian aviation. At that time, only 1 per cent of Indians used to fly. Boeing and Airbus executives in Seattle and Toulouse were salivating over the prospect that even if 10 per cent Indians took to the skies with increasing prosperity, aircraft manufacturers would have it good for another decade or two.
The pandemic has been the death knell for many airlines the world over, but in India, recovery from Covid-19 is surprisingly robust and ongoing. But patterns of doing business will drastically change. Puri and his team are creatively adapting to this change. For instance, the Civil Aviation Minister is working on building an aircraft leasing business in India, which would finance new aircraft deliveries through leases instead of purchases. This is based on the premise that the share of aircraft on lease globally increased from 40 per cent before the onset of the pandemic to 50 per cent now.
Puri predicts that at the present post-Covid rate of recovery, India will need 100 aircraft deliveries each year for the next 20 years. If the bulk of these deliveries are to come through long-term leases, the business will be worth a whopping $290 billion. Instead of filling order books of aircraft manufacturers, the plan now is to route the aircraft leasing business in India through the International Financial Services Centre Authority, specifically the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, better known as GIFT City. If these plans materialise, one of the main thrusts of India’s economic diplomacy in the coming years will be through civil aviation.
