Air Transportation – India

Air transportation – India can be divided into 2 categories – Passenger traffic and freight traffic. India has a population of around 1.4 billion. As can be seen from the chart below, around 38% of India lives in cities. Following is the chart of air passenger traffic in India.

Passenger traffic

Air transport, passengers carried in India was reported at 326 Million in 2023.

In India, there were over 400 airports and airstrips, while 136 were operational. Passenger traffic amounted to over 327 million at airports across India in financial year 2023, out of which close to 57 million were international passengers.

However, there was a drop in traffic of both the domestic and international passengers in 2021. This was because of suspended passenger air travel due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic since the second half of March 2020.

IndiGo airline was the leading passenger carrier in India with around 55 percent of market share in financial year 2022. It was established back in 2006 as a low-cost airline based at IGI Airport, Delhi. Following IndiGo airline was SpiceJet, also a budget airline with a much less 13 percent market share.

Freight traffic

Air transport, freight (million ton-km) in India was reported at 908 million ton-km in 2021, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators.

The total air freight tonnage handled in India was around 2.5 million metric tons in financial year 2021. It was an increase from the previous year recovering from the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. IGI Airport in Delhi was the busiest in terms of volume of freight handled. In financial year 2021, India saw the highest volume of air freight of 3.56 million metric tons. It was on a steady growth trend until the start of pandemic.

If we simply put these numbers in perspective; we observe the following:

1. Air traffic has not even reached the peak of 2019
2. Only 326 million passengers of the 1.4 billion population of India travels by plane. The actual number of people will be even lesser as the above number is number of travelers (many of which may not be unique). If we assume an average of 4 travel per passenger; it is 80 million passengers out of 1.4 billion which comes to less than 5%.

Given both of these, the possibility of air traffic increase in India looks immense. Some more interesting facts about air transport in India.