Prime Minister Narendra Modi has now flagged off the Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik Scheme, better known as UDAN. The basic premise of UDAN, to paraphrase the prime minister, is to see the common man take to Indian skies. But this whole scheme isn’t really necessary, and will only put more financial pressure on airlines, governments and the common man too!
The fundamentals of the scheme are to fix low prices for regional flights, metros to regional centres or just between regional centres. A flight covering a distance of 500 kilometers (or a journey of one hour) will not cost more than Rs 2500. Of course, this will be for just 50 percent of seats on the flight, not the entire airline. As of now, the scheme will cover just three sectors up in north India, but there are plans to expand to 70 airports in total, covering 22 states. Apart from Spice Jet and Alliance Air, a subsidiary of Air India, the other airlines that have signed up are regional airlines like Air Odisha.
But fixing low prices on flights comes at a cost, since if one person is not paying for something, there’s another somewhere that certainly is. The government will compensate Air India, for instance, over Rs 3000 for capping the fare. About 80 percent of this subsidy will then be collected by levying a charge of Rs 50 on tickets in major sectors, which means that you will most likely be charged that price the next time you fly from Mumbai to Delhi, for example.
For a long time in India’s aviation space, low airfares on smaller sectors happened as a result of higher fares on the major sectors. This means basic subsidisation already existed. What Narendra Modi is doing is nothing really different or unique. But this might not be the most advisable thing. He says he wants to remove the image in people’s minds that flying is only for the elite, but the fact is that subsidising airfare isn’t going to bring about change in lifestyles or even speed up ease of travel. What should be more important right now for the government, is to develop the railways and perhaps even road routes for vehicular travel. Take Europe for instance, where a large section of people travel by train or car throughout the continent. Flying there is not for the elite but only for those who need to get somewhere in a hurry.
Railways, not airlines, are mass transit systems. It is not elitist thought to want to better these systems instead of creating nonsensical subsidy schemes for air travel. The government needs to concentrate their energies into better, more sensible, methods of progress.
