A 91% Fund Cut, 30% Air Traffic Controller Vacancies: In Numbers, Civil Aviation's Acute Safety Crisis
Mumbai: An under-funded aviation safety regulator, an under-staffed safety apparatus, a debilitating shortage of pilots due to paucity of government funds: India’s civil aviation is ailing from years of government neglect that could turn fatal for passengers, as the crash of the Air India flight 171 showed a week ago.
Data gleaned from various government and parliamentary sources indicates that even as India’s aviation sector has grown multi-fold from 66 million passengers in 2014 to 161 million in 2024, agencies in charge of passenger safety have shrunk in size, with crucial posts vacant and critical operations potentially hit.
All this, aviation safety experts, insiders of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and industry veterans The Wire spoke to said, could end up seriously compromising passenger safety and lead to flying disasters like last week’s plane crash. The Wire has reached out to the DGCA director general Faiz Ahmed Kidwai over email. It has also reached out to the Ministry of Civil Aviation. The piece will be updated when they respond.
Since 2020, there have been 2,461 technical faults in flights operated by Indian domestic carriers: more than half of them (1,288) were in Indigo Airlines, Spicejet saw 633 technical faults while Air India and its subsidiary Air India Express Ltd saw 389 faults, till January 2025, according to data shared by the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) in parliament.
Last year alone, India saw 23 instances where domestic airline operators flouted air safety norms, the MoCA told Parliament in February this year. Twelve of these 23 instances came from Air India and its subsidiaries, including a serious incident when Air India paired non-qualified crew to operate a Mumbai-Riyadh flight last year.
Yet, over the last two years, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has seen its budget cut down by nearly a fifth: from earmarking Rs 3,113 crore in the 2023-24 budget, the Modi government cut it down to Rs 2,357 crore in 2024-25 budget. Despite the ministry submitting revised estimates of Rs 2,658 crore that year, which is Rs 300 crore more than what the government allotted it, the Modi government in its latest budget slashed the ministry’s budget down further to bring it to Rs 2,400 crore, a decrease of 23% in two years.
There has been a steep drop in the ministry’s capital outlay over the last two years: from Rs 755 crore in 2023-24 to merely Rs 70 crore this year, a staggering 91% cut.
This March, a report of the parliamentary standing committee on transport, tourism and culture headed by Sanjay Kumar Jha – an MP from the BJP’s alliance partner Janata Dal (United) – flagged this glaring cut in remarks on the MoCA’s demand for grants.
“While fiscal prudence is necessary, the Committee feels such a steep decline may impact the aviation sector’s capacity for growth, modernisation, and global competitiveness,” the panel said, pointing to this 91% slash in the budget.
It wasn’t the first time that the panel had warned the Modi government about the funding cuts it was imposing on the ministry and air safety apparatus.
In 2023-24, the same panel’s report on the ministry’s demand of grants in 2023-24 had flagged the ministry’s dipping budget.
“These decreasing allocations have been made despite the increasing trend of inflation in the country, which implies that the effective allocations are ever lower,” the panel had said in its report.
One direct impact of this has been on the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).
The regulator is responsible for everything from ensuring that airline operators are following safety procedures, conducting audits and checks to issuing air safety guidelines, and standard operating procedures, while cracking down on errant airline operators not following these rules.
In a response to the same parliamentary panel in 2022, the MoCA said the DGCA was supposed to carry out “regulatory audits of operators and maintenance organisations” as well as “periodic spot checks”, along with analysing accidents and incidents to avoid their recurrence.
However, the regulator has seen its budget shrink, despite the boom in air travel: from a capital outlay budget of Rs 55 crore in 2023-24, the Modi government this year slashed the budget by nearly a half, to Rs 30 crore.
This fund crunch has combined with burgeoning vacancies within the regulator: from 471 vacant posts in 2020, the number has only climbed. By March this year, it was a staggering 814. Thus 48% of the total 1,692 posts are empty, as per parliamentary data from April this year.
Similar is the case with the Airports Authority of India which has faced a double-whammy of both, its sanctioned strength going down from 27,074 posts in 2020 to 25,730 posts in March 2025, and its vacancies remaining nearly steady at 9,502 posts, over 36% of the total strength of the outfit. AAI staffers are responsible for crucial services like air traffic control management at airports, maintenance of communication and navigation systems, managing cargo terminals among other things.
The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security, in charge of ensuring passenger security, currently has 37% of its 598 posts vacant, the same parliament data revealed.
Sources within the DGCA said that this neglect has had a direct bearing on passenger safety.
An ex-official from the DGCA’s airworthiness directorate (DAW), requesting anonymity, said the regulator’s functions, including conducting surprise spot checks, were being hampered as a result of the personnel shortage.
“We are supposed to verify the claims by operators that they are following all safety protocols,” the official. “But there is such an acute shortage of personnel, that such inspections are just not possible in a large scale,” the source added.
Captain Mohan Ranganathan, a former member of the MoCA’s Civil Aviation Safety Advisory Committee, concurred with the source.
“Take the total number of airports we have in the country,” he said, pointing to 159 operational airports, as per MoCA data furnished in parliament this year. “A surveillance audit of each airport takes about 2-3 days, and the DGCA has previously said such audits would be done twice a year,” he said.
“Where is the manpower to conduct such audits?,” he asked.
Ranganathan pointed to the 2010 crash of the Air India Express flight 182 on landing at the Mangalore airport, which killed 158 people. “There had been an inspection done of the airport just two days prior to the incident,” he said. The report of the court of inquiry into the crash, accessed by The Wire, confirms Ranganathan’s statement.
Also read: Air India Crash Latest Blot in Boeing’s History, Whistleblowers Had Raised Concerns on Dreamliner
Inviting trouble?
This neglect isn’t limited to flight inspections alone.
Another critical task that is likely to have been impacted is control and regulation of air traffic. In a response to a question in parliament by AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi earlier this year, the MoCA minister of state Murlidhar Mohol admitted that despite the country being in need of 5,537 air traffic controllers (ATCOs), the Airport Authority of India had hired only 3,924. Thus, there was a shortfall of nearly 30%.
Experts warn that such a shortfall could be very dangerous.
ATCOs manage air traffic at airports, and are in coordination with pilots facilitating take-offs and landings.
Overworked ATCOs, stretched thin due to a staff crunch, can often turn dangerous, said Ranganathan.
“For instance, during the recent India-Pakistan conflict, much of the traffic was being re-routed through Mumbai,” he said. “If traffic suddenly spikes and the ATCOs suffer even a momentary lapse in concentration because they are overworked, we could have seen a disaster,” he added.
A New York Times report on the January air collision between a passenger jet and a military Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac river in Washington D.C., killing 67, revealed that the ATCOs at the Ronald Reagan National Airport were short-staffed, resulting in the same ATCO performing duties for two ATCOs, simultaneously.
Even the parliamentary panel, in its March 2022 report, had castigated the MoCA for these vacancies, insisting that ATCOs play an “indispensable role” in the safe operations of aircrafts.
“The Committee is of the opinion that the demand for ATCOs will rise exponentially with the growth of the aviation sector in the country,” it said. “…[T]he Ministry should have anticipated the requirement of more ATCOs well in advance and inducted ATCOs continuously over the years.”
Three years after the report, nearly one in three ATCO posts remain empty.
Under-funding training of pilots
The parliamentary panel in its March 2022 report said the government admitted, as part of its National Civil Aviation policy of 2016, that India’s domestic aviation sector had been “restricted by the shortage of appropriate skills required in different sectors of civil aviation. This includes trained pilots, aircraft engineers and technicians, cabin crew, ground handling staff, cargo handling staff, administrative and sale staff, etc.”
Yet, the government has taken little steps to address this shortage and has, in fact, added to the problem with its neglect.
The country’s largest flying trying academy, the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi (IGRUA) in Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli is an example. In the last three years alone, Indian airline operators have placed orders for 1,359 new aircraft likely to be inducted over the next eight years, as per MoCA data.
While the demand for pilots is rising and expected to peak as new aircraft come in, IGRUA’s ability to respond to this is being constricted: its fleet of aircraft, meant to train aspiring pilots is down from 24 aircraft in 2017 to just 15 in 2023, as per MoCA data presented in parliament in February last year.
Also read: The DGCA Has Played Fast and Loose With Pilots' Wellbeing
India would require over 30,000 pilots over the next decade, as per an estimate by the parliamentary panel in March this year. “The requirement of commercial pilots in the country is roughly a thousand every year. However, with the existing FTOs, the country can barely produce 300 commercial pilots and another 300 pilots train abroad, leaving a large gap in the requirement for commercial pilots,” it added.
Thanks to the neglect in funding institutions like the IGRUA, more and more aspiring Indian pilots are forced to go abroad for their pilot training – from 59% of all Indian pilots emerging from Indian flying schools in 2019, the number dipped to 53% in 2022, it found.
Captain Shakti Lumba, the former Vice President of Flight operations at Indigo from its founding till 2010, said such neglect was also deliberate. “There are many private flying schools that have mushroomed and keeping the IGRUA under-funded helps these private schools,” he said.
Similarly, even the Rajiv Gandhi National Aviation University (RGNAU) in Amethi, which offers diplomas as well as undergraduate and post-graduate degrees for skilled personnel in aviation operations, has been suffering similar neglect – its funding has come down to a trickle, from Rs 18 crore in 2018-19 to Rs 10 crore in this year’s budget.
This March, the parliamentary panel on civil aviation expressed “serious concerns” at this under-funding and recommended a dramatic increase in budgetary support. It recommended a “substantial enhancement of budgetary support for aviation education institutions,” including a “minimum five-fold increase” to the RGNAU and a “significant revision” of IGRUA’s funding to “enable infrastructure modernisation and curriculum enhancement aligned with international standards,” the panel added in its report.
'Only going to worsen'
Experts say these systemic flaws are likely to hurt India’s skies, and its growing domestic passenger class.
As mentioned before, in February, the Modi government told parliament that there were 159 operational airports in the country and it has decided to revive or develop at least 50 more airports/helipads/water aerodromes and advanced landing groups till March 2026.
Lumba, the former commander, said ATCO vacancies are only going to increase.
“We are seeing new airports spring up regularly, and each of these airports will need ATCOs, so the vacancies are only going to increase, unless hirings are made swiftly,” he said.
As aircraft age, and crippling manpower shortages in the DGCA reduce its capability to inspect them thoroughly, Ranganathan, the aviation safety expert, said this portended a turbulent time.
“Currently, most aircraft are new, and for the first ten years, they don’t have any major flaws, so we don’t feel it as much,” he said.
“But as more aircraft get older, these flaws will be exposed.”
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