Page 100 - EW-January-2026

Postscript

Price-gouging nation for over a decade. As a result, contemporary Bangalore
has the slowest automobile vehicles speed (10 km/per
HE GREAT INDIGO MELTDOWN OF EARLY De- hour) worldwide, and industry is fleeing the city.
cember during which India’s #1 airline which hith- On the other hand, savour this report on the develop-
Terto operated over 2,000 flights per day, cancelled ment of PRC’s Guizhou Province. According to a new
4,500 flights between December 4-10, leaving millions book titled Breakneck — China’s Quest to Engineer the
of passengers with reservations in the lurch, proved that Future (Penguin Random House, 2025) authored by Dan
the increasingly beautiful face of Indian capitalism still Wang, a history research fellow at Stanford University
requires a lot of improvement. who spent six years in PRC researching this mind-bend-
Overarching emphasis on profit at the cost of brand- ing book: “Guizhou has built 45 of the world’s 100 highest
building — and a fight between promoters for full control bridges. It has 11 airports, with three under construction.
— has proved to be the nemesis of the country’s new-hope It has 5,000 miles of expressways, ranked fourth among
civil airline. In 2023, the company placed a whopping provinces in China by length. It has around 1,000 miles of
order for 500 A320 wide-bodied passenger aircraft as a high-speed train track…” Plus it has “enormous facilities”
result of which its fleet strength crossed 400. However housing data servers. Despite this impressive track re-
incredibly, it didn’t occur to its squabbling top manage- cord, Guizhou is one of PRC’s under-developed provinces.
ment that more aircraft require more pilots. Consequent- Its per capita income at $8,000 per year is 40 percent
ly, currently the pilots-aircraft ratio of Indigo is 13:1 cf. below China’s national average ($14,000), but way above
Air India’s 26:1 and the global average of 20:1. Therefore, India’s $2,600.
after the Union government’s new FDTL (flight duty time Time for our politicians banging the religion and caste
limitations) rules which made more rest and less night drums and academics in ivory towers to wake up!
landing times for pilots mandatory for all airlines (follow-
ing the dreadful crash of an Air India flight on take-off
from Ahmedabad-London in June 2025), were promul- Champagne socialism
gated (after two years advance notice) on November 1,
the bottom-line obsessed Indigo management which was N THE SOUTHERN STATE OF KARNATAKA (pop.63
squeezing the maximum out of its pilots was caught flat- million), incumbent Chief Minister Siddaramaiah
footed. Hence the mass cancellation of flights last month. Iis engaged in a very public war with Deputy Chief
Yet the most depressing conclusion of this civil avia- Minister D.K. Shivakumar over a reported promise to
tion imbroglio which has cost Indigo passengers millions relinquish the chief minister’s office midway after the
in time and money lost, is that despite 80 years of mealy- Congress won the state legislative election of May, 2023.
mouth socialism — or perhaps because of it — India It is widely acknowledged that DKS was the chief strate-
is a nation of price gougers. Immediately after Indigo gist behind the Congress party which against all expecta-
cancelled thousands of flights in December, every airline, tions and opinion poll predictions, ousted the two-term
including Air India, now managed by the sanctimonious BJP government of the state.
Tatas, raised airfares ten-fold to book windfall profits. The fact that the Congress party’s victorious strategy
And everyone else including road taxis, buses and railway was majorly based on the large number of freebies (free
employees joined the party to raise their fares sky-high bus rides for women, 200 units of household electricity,
and fleece desperate travellers. free rations etc) valued at over Rs.52,000 crore per year —
In polite society, such brazen profiteering is widely equivalent to 20 percent of the state government’s annual
condemned as price scalping/gouging. Yet in post- revenue — is another matter, and is to a large extent the
independence India with its faux socialism heritage, it’s cause and effect of Bangalore’s collapsing infrastructure.
accepted as normal, a virus that has blighted the face of Even if it’s true — though improbable — that he didn’t
Indian capitalism. Beyond a point, greed is not good. make the promise to hand over the reins midway, quite
clearly it’s time for Siddaramaiah to go. Because despite
his proclaimed socialism, the CM is busily engaged in the
Them & us worst practices of capitalism. Last month, an alert media
scribe noticed that the CM tells the time from a French-
NDIA’S POLITICIANS AND POLICY FORMULATORS made Cartier watch priced at Rs.43 lakh. Last year, he
loud on proclamations, as also media and thinktank was involved neck deep in a Mysore Urban Development
Ipundits, seem to be cavalierly casual about the pell- Authority (MUDA) land conversion scandal during which
mell pace at which the neighbouring (professedly com- he brazenly demanded Rs.62 crore as compensation;
munist/socialist but in reality arch capitalist) People’s and recently it has come to light that since 2023, he has
Republic of China (PRC) is transforming into a global debited the state government of Rs.43 crore for frequently
superpower. commuting between Bengaluru and Mysore/Mysuru, his
In Bangalore/Bengaluru (pop.14 million), widely constituency and also his home town, by private jet and
proclaimed as the Silicon Valley of India, several Metro helicopter.
rail projects are years behind schedule: the MG Road/Ka- Clearly, that’s a lifestyle that Karnataka suffering the
maraj Road stretch closure for metro construction which after-effects of droughts and floods in the rural north and
should have been opened in 2023, has been delayed to collapsing infrastructure in Bengaluru that is prompting
2026; a planned suburban rail link — the Kolar-White- flight of capital, can’t afford. Even if he didn’t make that
field rail line — is moribund 13 years after sanction; a promise to switch horses midstream, it’s time for the chief
Peripheral Ring Road around Bengaluru has been delayed minister to redeem it.

100 EDUCATIONWORLD JANUARY 2026