Domestic air passenger traffic expected to climb this year: Cleartrip Senior Vice-President

India’s domestic air passenger traffic growth, which had witnessed a slump on the back of the grounding of Jet Airways and the general slowdown in the economy, is expected to pick up this year.

According to Balu Ramachandran, Senior Vice-President, Cleartrip, if the divestment of Air India goes through this year, then it would bring about higher capacity addition, thereby leading to “robust” growth in passenger traffic.

“We had a fairly catastrophic event this year with Jet Airways going down, and subsequent to that the overall capacity addition in the Indian market by all domestic carriers came down to about 4-5 per cent during the April-October period. This is in stark contrast to the growth of 18-20 per cent in the same period last year,” Ramachandran told BusinessLine.