From Chitral to Chittagong, Southasians are flying in greater numbers than ever before. At a time when aviation fuel prices have hit the roof, they are taking advantage of airfares that continue to drop. In India, no-frills budget airlines are drawing passengers away from the Indian Railways. And across borders, private airlines are bringing new dynamism to routes sectors once monopolised by state-run carriers.
Budget travel boom
It is in India, the aviation sector's biggest domestic market, that the impact of liberalization is most apparent. First, there is the number of airlines. A decade ago, passengers arriving at the domestic terminal of Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport would see nothing but Indian Airlines' red-tailed Airbuses and their hand-me-down first-generation Boeing 737s in the non-descript livery of Alliance Air. Today, the tarmac is a garden of colours with Jet Airways' yellow sun, Air Sahara's green and saffron stripes, and Air Deccan's open palms.
The airways of Southasia are unrecognisable from what they were just a few years ago. And the current buzz of flight activity is only the beginning, for there are scores of cities waiting to be linked, and millions of the middle class who would fly if only a well-connected airline would land at their local airstrips. Indeed, there is still much to be done even in the linking of the region's capitals: The best way to get from Kathmandu to Colombo is via Bangkok or New Delhi, and no one can get to Islamabad/ Rawalpindi without a stopover in Lahore, Karachi or Doha. But as liberalisation of the cross-border and domestic sectors is spurred on by a crucially important Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation bent on opening up the skies, it seems that the Subcontinent is set to become smaller and smaller still.