Domestic commercial flights are allowed to resume in India, albeit in a staggered manner. What do the domestic air traffic numbers say?

The second-most populous country in the world and Asia’s worst-hit by COVID-19, India has decided to resume economic activities. On March 25, when there were just over 600 COVID-19 cases in the country, India went into total lockdown. All commercial flights were brought to a halt. Aviation statistics show a 98 percent year-to-year drop in India’s domestic flights in the last week of March. After 61 days, with over 130,000 cases and 4000 deaths, domestic commercial flights were allowed to resume in India, albeit in a staggered manner.

HealthLEADS runs the numbers behind India’s domestic air traffic in recent weeks.

May 25, 2020, saw 414 domestic flights being tracked in India, as compared to 66 the day earlier. With airlines modifying their operations to maintain norms, there has been a gradual increase in scheduled passenger flights to a little over 700 on June 15. This, while being a direct consequence of the staggered and partial nature of resumption, is about 2000 flights fewer than the same time last year.

India’s busiest airport, Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA), has seen the maximum number of flights since resumption. 10,903 of the 15,657 domestic flights between May 25 and June 15 either originated from or terminated at Delhi. Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA), the second busiest, has seen 4682 flights during the same period. India’s remaining airports saw merely 72 flights, a share of less than 5 percent.

Guidelines were issued by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare on May 24, for domestic air travel. The centre’s guidelines primarily instruct on social distancing and sanitisation practices, while leaving quarantine, isolation, and testing to the discretion of individual state governments.

Delhi has mandated home quarantine of seven days for all domestic passengers coming in at the IGIA. Arrivals at Mumbai’s CSIA are required to undergo a 14-day home quarantine. Jammu & Kashmir has obligated COVID-19 tests, in addition to institutional quarantine, for all passengers arriving at Jammu and Srinagar. In Bihar, however, regulations are extremely loose. Passengers arriving at Patna’s Jai Prakash Narayan Airport are not required to undergo any form of quarantine, nor are they tested for COVID-19, even if symptomatic.
While commercial international flights remain suspended to and from India, repatriation flights under the government’s Vande Bharat Mission are being operated by Air India and IndiGo to bring back Indian nationals stuck abroad. Foreign nationals held up in India have also been ferried back on a number of international flights.