By Ujjwal Kumar & Saharsh Panjwani
To achieve the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, India’s Competition Commission must look beyond digital platforms to traditional sectors like aviation, using advocacy to protect consumer
Maintaining India’s stature as a welfare state, the Union Government’s long term . term development vision, articulated in the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, frames growth in terms of household welfare, affordability of essential goods and services, and access to markets and infrastructure.
This also aligns closely with the foundational purpose of competition law, which has always extended beyond protecting market participants to shielding consumers from anti-competitive behaviour. This principle drove the transition from the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1969 to the Competition Act, 2002, following the Raghavan Committee’s recommendations taking into account India’s transition from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ economy.
The Committee explicitly called for Indian competition law to prioritise “consumer interest and economic efficiency” — a mandate that remains central to the country’s broader development ambitions today.
Evolving Priorities in Competition Policy: Increasing Focus on Platform Markets
A notable shift has emerged in recent years. As digitalisation of the economy has grown in significance and scale, competition policy has increasingly oriented itself toward technology driven concerns, especially platform markets – a trend observed globally and reflected in India through the formation of the CCI’s Digital Markets and Data Unit, the 2023 Amendment Act, and the proposed Digital Competition Bill.
Data from 2020 to 2025 illustrate this clearly: roughly one-fifth of pending and ongoing investigations, one-quarter of final and interim orders, and 44% of market studies pertained to the technology sector.
The emphasis on platform markets is understandable given their rapid growth. However, at the same time, it is worth assessing whether sufficient attention is being directed toward traditional sectors that directly impact consumer affordability and access to essential services. This becomes rather crucial, especially considering the limitations of the Indian competition regulator’s financial and personnel capacity – a concern the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance also flagged, urging the MCA and CCI to expedite cadre restructuring and bolster institutional capacity.
India’s aviation industry offers one illustration of why broader sectoral attention matters. Now the world’s third-largest domestic market, projected to reach 500 million passengers annually by 2030, aviation is a sector with direct and significant consumer welfare implications.
In 2010, the sector was characterized by multiple competing airlines, offering consumers a range of choices and relatively competitive fares. However, structural pressures including thin profit margins, large capital requirements and high operating costs led to consolidation over time resulting in a near-duopoly. In such a concentrated market, dominant airlines can influence fares,capacity, routes, and service conditions in ways that may disadvantage both rivals and passengers.
Recent consumer disruption following enforcement of the revised Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) underscores the point: weak compliance, amplified by a concentrated market with limited spare capacity, rapidly cascaded into widespread passenger disruption. Although the CCI recently took cognisance of concerns involving IndiGo regarding mass flight cancellations, consumer harm in the aviation sector has been an ongoing discussion with concerns raised around pricing volatility, capacity constraints, and service disruptions.
Addressing these concerns requires a focused whole-of-government approach with a consumer welfare agenda. Regulatory coordination between the CCI, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, and the Ministry of Civil Aviation is needed to ensure fair access to essential facilities, transparent slot allocation, easier airline entry, and non-discriminatory access to airport infrastructure.
Instead of solely relying on competition enforcement, the CCI, therefore, should also use its advocacy function more actively. For instance, a formal competition assessment of the aviation market would be a productive starting point, followed by a targeted advocacy agenda directed at structural bottlenecks. The CCI began a competition assessment exercise under its Advocacy Division in 2016–17, with a dedicated toolkit and institutional collaborations, but that initiative appears to have lost momentum. It is timely to revive it, with priority attention to highly concentrated sectors including aviation to generate evidence for policy reform and coordinated regulatory action.
Moving Beyond Platform Markets
Consumer welfare remains the foundational objective of India’s competition framework, and the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision reinforces its centrality to inclusive growth and economic empowerment. As competition policy continues to evolve, maintaining a holistic view of consumer welfare across all sectors of the economy will be essential. The aviation sector illustrates a broader gap between where competition policy’s attention currently falls and where consumers most acutely need its protection.
Closing that gap will require the CCI to look beyond its most visible enforcement frontiers. This means continuing to build institutional capacity, sustaining multi-sectoral enforcement attention, and ensuring that the setting of competition priorities is carefully calibrated against tangible outcomes for consumers. Such an approach will be central to realising the vision of Viksit Bharat 2047.
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