Even as millions of passengers across India are left stranded at airports, IndiGo’s celebrity-studded board of directors appears fully occupied fulfilling its real mandate—being celebrities. Sunbathing, spa appointments, beauty treatments, and issuing instructions to personal staff seem to be firmly on schedule.
Professional responsibility? One might ask.
If the job description reads “Collect your paycheck and look the other way,” it would be unfair to expect more.
These are individuals not meant to be inconvenienced by operational crises while sipping champagne and smoking Cubans with fellow elites. These people are like the decorations you hang on a Christmas tree. And as for empathy or accountability—please understand—they neither need to care nor want to. After all, these board members were hired for what they once were, not for what they could still contribute.
Ironically, this board is a veritable who’s-who of business and management. Which leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: both IndiGo and its board know something passengers don’t—IndiGo is simply too big to fail.
The government has little choice but to tread lightly. It won’t take over IndiGo; it lacks the operational expertise. It won’t break the airline into smaller entities; it has no precedent in doing so. And so, instead of enforcing accountability, the government becomes not just accommodating, but exceptionally deferential.
Case in point: regulations were rolled back, allowing IndiGo to continue operating with overworked pilots, much as before. If this begins to resemble a corporate playbook for holding governments hostage, it’s hard to argue otherwise. So is this a failure of talent at IndiGo, or a failure of intent? It’s certainly not a lack of talent. Had there been genuine concern, the airline could have simply sought an extension to implement new policies in a phased, responsible manner. That alone could have prevented this entire fiasco. So with Indigo, there’s no boarding pass…just a major boarding fail!
Does this all mean that Indigo is solely to blame? No! The Government is a(n) innocent guilty bystander in this debacle.