Although they are an unmitigated blessing which have reduced long-winded train journeys to a sepia memory, there’s something wrong about the hyper-commercialism of the men (in the words of a learned judge, the word embraces women) who run India’s airlines. The pejorative “price gouging” doesn’t seem to be part of their vocabularies. Recently when the domestic airline GoAir faced headwinds and was obliged to cease operations because of mismanagement which lumbered it with heavy debt, other airlines promptly seized the opportunity to charge sky-high air fares on domestic routes because of a sudden shortage of capacity, especially on the routes also serviced by Go Air (mis) managed by a scion of the Mumbai-based Wadia family of Bombay Dyeing fame.
In mid-May your editor, stricken by a stress-related illness which according to expert medical opinion was the consequence of unwarranted fastidiousness in presenting a world-class publication to an “ADHD target market accustomed to reading headlines, if that,” booked a ticket to sunny Goa for an R&R break. For a 40-minute flight from Bangalore to Goa which is ordinarily priced at Rs.4,000, the asking rate had shot up to Rs.13,000. And another gent who was under compulsion to fly from Delhi to Dehradun, a 30 minute flight, was obliged to pay Rs.45,000 for the last remaining seat.
On the other hand, according to a statement issued by the Bangalore police on July 19, 722 auto-rickshaw drivers were fined for over-charging commuters beyond meters issued by the state government’s transport ministry and/or refusal to ply. Likewise, Uber and Ola taxi-drivers who practice surge pricing also suffer punishment by the withered arm of the law. However, for mysterious reasons a cap on airfares was lifted last August. Since then their managements have been routinely price gouging whenever opportunity presents itself.
Undoubtedly, the Indian economy needs to be freed from the iron grip of licence-permit-quota raj from which the neta-babu brotherhood has profited mightily, but what’s a crime for an auto-rickshaw/taxi driver can’t be allowed to be passed off as routine ‘free markets’ business by dressed up civil aviation managers. They are giving free markets ideology a bad reputation.
