TRAVELLING inside India used to involve a choice: shelling out a small fortune for an exorbitant flight leaving at some unearthly hour; or a lengthy train ride which, with swarming crowds and foetid lavatories was only for the unsqueamish or desperate.
India’s revolution in air travel has changed all that. The past couple of years have brought the launch of four new airlines — three of them modelled on Ryanair — offering dirt-cheap air tickets.
With fares cheaper than train tickets in many cases, some of the 15 million Indians who travel on the railways every day can now afford to fly. A flight from Delhi to Bombay could be the price of a cheap lunch in London — £33 or so. And the cheap fares are giving tourists a chance to move around more easily and see more of the country.
“We’ve brought about a social revolution. We’ve broken the ‘caste’ barrier that prevented ordinary people from boarding a plane,” says Captain G. R. Gopinath, founder of Air Deccan, India’s first no-frills airline, launched in 2003.
The monopoly of the state-owned domestic carrier, Indian Airlines, ended in the early 1990s when private airlines were first allowed as part of a new “open skies” policy. But these airlines — Jet Airways and Air Sahara — offered fares that were not so different from those of Indian Airlines.
The real transformation began in 2003 when Gopinath realised that “there were one billion hungry consumers waiting to buy tickets if they were affordable”. He launched Air Deccan with a mission to demystify air travel and get the “common man” flying.
In 2005 the airline carried one million passengers. This year it expects to carry four million. About 40 per cent of them will be first-time travellers. Roughly 30 per cent will be foreign tourists. “With the kind of explosive growth we’re seeing, (the domestic aviation market) is going to have 50 million domestic passengers in five years’ time,” says Kapil Kaul, of the Centre for Asia- Pacific Aviation.
Last year SpiceJet and Go Air, both budget airlines, and Kingfisher, a full-service carrier from the same group that owns Kingfisher lager, took off. Five more are being launched during 2006. Most of the new airlines — with the exception of Air Deccan — have well-designed websites. All offer e-tickets, so overseas users can book flights.
Suddenly, from having hardly any internal flights, India has hundreds, and not just to the predictable places — Bombay, Srinagar, Goa, Calcutta and Hyderabad. New airlines are also flying to smaller towns such as Jammu, Coimbatore and Dibrugarh.
“It’s opened up the country. There are so many forts, palaces and wildlife parks that used to be hard to reach. Now a short flight gets you there,” says Arup Sen, executive director of the tour operator Cox & Kings in Bombay.
This is great news for tourists on a budget, but also for the well-heeled traveller, since the aviation boom means more flexibility. For example, a trip to the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar used to require a 12-hour return train ride from Delhi. Now it can be done in a day trip.
That’s the case with lots of other places — the Kanha wildlife sanctuary (where Kipling got his inspiration for The Jungle Book), the town of Dehra Dun, known as the gateway to the Himalayas, and the temple town of Khajuraho, famous for its erotic sculptures.
“For tourists on a tight itinerary, it’s great. It’s a nightmare getting train reservations and the potholed roads are terrible, so a cheap flight at a convenient time is much better,” says Subhash Goel, president of the Indian Association of Tour Operators.
