MUMBAI: India capped airfares on Saturday as hundreds of passengers gathered outside Bengaluru and Mumbai airports after IndiGo cancelled 385 flights on the fifth day of a crisis at the country’s biggest airline that has crippled air travel.

IndiGo has cancelled thousands of flights this week due to a shortage of pilots after it failed to plan adequately for new rules limiting pilots’ work hours.

The government responded on Friday, announcing special relief for the carrier and the operation of additional trains to help clear the backlog. The Delhi airport posted on X on Saturday that flight operations were steadily resuming, but cancellations remained rife elsewhere.

With IndiGo’s spate of cancellations, fares rose on flights operated by other airlines on popular routes. The government said it was capping fares to maintain pricing discipline.

The Civil Aviation Ministry said it would “continue to closely monitor fare levels through real-time data and active coordination with airlines”.

Fares were last capped during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

The Indian government said a one-way fare for a journey up to 500 kilometers cannot be more than 7,500 rupees ($83), whereas for journeys between 1,000 and 1,500km — like one that would apply to the New Delhi-Mumbai route — it should be capped at 15,000 rupees ($167).

That was well under the 20,419-rupee ($227) price advertised by Air India on its website for a Delhi-Mumbai flight on Saturday.

‘Waiting for my luggage’

The flight cancellations are the biggest crisis ever for 20-year-old IndiGo, which has an over 60 per cent market share in the world’s most-populous country and has prided itself on on-time performance while luring passengers with lower fares.

IndiGo acknowledges failing to plan properly for the November 1 deadline to implement the stricter rules on night flying and weekly rest for pilots, though it only suffered a roster crisis this week as air travel approached a December peak.

On Friday, more than 1,000 IndiGo flights were cancelled.

Published in Dawn, December 7th, 2025