-Digvijay Raskar

December was a hard month for air travellers in India. Airports stopped feeling like transit points and began to feel like places people were trapped in. Families slept on cold floors. Children cried from hunger and exhaustion. Elderly passengers fainted while standing in endless queues. Many travellers spent entire nights inside terminals, unsure when—or if—they would finally get destination.

Over November and December, more than 2,000 IndiGo flights were cancelled, and many more were delayed. This disruption mattered because IndiGo operates over 2,300 flights every day and carries nearly three lakh passengers daily. DGCA data shows that in October 2025, IndiGo held a 65.5 percent market share of India’s aviation sector. When an airline this large slows down, the ripple effects are felt everywhere—from Delhi and Mumbai to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and dozens of smaller airports.

What shocked people most was that this chaos was not caused by a cyclone, fog, or any natural disaster. It was triggered by a rule change.

The DGCA revised the Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) norms in January 2024 and implemented them in two phases during 2025.

The first phase, effective from July 1, 2025, increased mandatory weekly rest for pilots from 36 to 48 continuous hours. The second phase, rolled out on November 1, 2025, tightened night-flying rules by redefining night hours as midnight to 6 a.m., limiting pilots to two night landings per roster period, and allowing no more than two consecutive night duties.

The objective behind these rules was clear and reasonable: reduce pilot fatigue and improve safety. No one wants exhausted pilots in the cockpit. The intention was right. But good intentions do not always translate into good outcomes.

IndiGo operates on a tightly optimized, utility-maximising model. Aircraft fly for most of the day, crew schedules are packed back-to-back, and cost efficiency leaves very little slack. Estimates suggest the airline operates with a buffer of barely four percent. When the new duty limits came into force, pilots began hitting their legal limits much faster. Schedules that worked on paper stopped working in reality. Rosters collapsed. Flights had to be grounded at the last minute. With no room to absorb the shock, the entire system cracked.

What followed was not a feeling of improved safety for passengers. It was confusion, anger, and exhaustion. While airlines took the blame, this was not merely an airline failure. It was a policy failure. The rule itself was not wrong—the rollout was. When a single airline controls such a dominant share of air traffic, its operational readiness matters. Testing preparedness before enforcing sweeping changes becomes critical.

This is where Legislative Impact Assessment (LIA) comes in. At its core, LIA asks a simple question: Is the system ready for this change? It examines how a new rule will affect workers, businesses, infrastructure, and most importantly, ordinary people. It tries to anticipate what might break, who might suffer, and how those risks can be softened before the rule comes into force.

Many countries already follow this approach. The UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several European nations routinely assess the real-world impact of major policy changes. They study costs, capacity constraints, and human consequences. This does not dilute regulation—it strengthens it by making implementation smoother and fairer.

In India’s aviation case, the transition was not gradual; it was a shock. The system adjusted in real time, and passengers became the shock absorbers. Families paid the price. Children slept on airport floors while institutions figured things out. That should never be the cost of reform.

This problem is not unique to aviation. India has seen similar outcomes during the rollout of the Farm Bills in 2020 and the demonetisation decision of 2016. Time and again, policies falter not because they are fundamentally flawed, but because their impact is not fully thought through. There remains a clear gap between the public policy framework and the law-making process.

The lesson from the IndiGo crisis is simple yet profound. Laws do not live in files—they live in real lives. Good governance is not just about drafting rules; it is about understanding how those rules will affect people on the ground.

If we truly want safer skies, fairer systems, and better governance, we must begin by asking one basic question before making major changes: What will this mean for people—on day one, and especially for those standing on the last rung of the ladder?