India’s toxic skies have claimed their latest victim. With its founder Naresh Goyal out of Jet Airways and the airline on oxygen, India’s airline industry is continuing its pattern of boom and bust, despite the deceptive growth in the number of fliers. Jet isn’t the first airline to bow to financial pressure. Indian skies are littered with the wreckage of many entrepreneurial dreams that soared initially, but almost always came hurtling down.
Aviation and telecom were the flag bearers of a new India post the reforms of 1991. Recognizing the possibilities on both the supply and demand sides, these two sectors were among the first to be thrown open to private enterprise in the early 1990s by the genuinely reformist government of P.V. Narasimha Rao. Both sectors are in a mess today. In telecom, there are just three companies left to service the world’s second largest base of customers, while aviation is almost a one-horse race with a haemorrhaging Air India and, now, Jet barely surviving on the largesse of the government and state-owned banks.
