A decade earlier in 2016, the Ministry of Civil Aviation under the Modi government rolled out the regional connectivity scheme, UDAN – Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik. The architect of this policy, then a TDP MP and civil aviation minister, described its underlying ambition in clear terms: ‘this policy will help India become one of the world’s top three aviation markets by 2030’. It was, at the time, an aspirational claim attached to a scheme that hadn’t yet flown a single subsidised route. Time proved the minister right.
This week carries its own marker in that history: July 26, 2026, marks one year since the erstwhile visionary was sworn in as Governor of Goa, moving from the ministry that conceived the scheme to a different constitutional office. It is a fitting moment to check the scheme’s numbers against its original ambitions, on their own economic merits.
India in mid-2026 is the world’s third-largest domestic aviation market. This position was first referenced by the same ministry as early as 2017, within three years of the scheme’s architect, Pusapati Ashok Gajapathi Raju, taking charge as Union civil aviation minister. The 2030 target was met roughly half a decade ahead of schedule. That gap between projection and outcome is worth examining on its own economic merits, independent of the man who now serves as the Goa Governor because the data trail is unusually clean for an Indian infrastructure programme.
In 2014, domestic carriers flew roughly 6.74 crore passengers, per the Directorate General of Civil Aviation data reported that year. By FY2025-26, domestic annual passenger traffic stood at approximately 16.77 crore, a rise of roughly two-and-a-half times over the period.
This is not solely UDAN’s doing to be fair. India’s broader economic growth, low-cost carrier expansion, and rising middle-class disposable income all contributed independently. But the regional connectivity scheme specifically accounts for a measurable slice of it. By the ninth anniversary of this policy in October 2025, the Civil Aviation Ministry recorded 1.56 crore passengers carried across 3.23 lakh flights on UDAN routes alone, connecting 93 previously unserved airports, heliports and water aerodromes. This brings in roughly Rs 4,300 crore disbursed in viability gap funding and a further Rs 4,638 crore invested in airport infrastructure.
One of the more specific, checkable claims from Raju’s tenure concerns the seaplanes. Inaugurating the upgraded Hubballi airport in 2017, he pointed to India’s 7,500-kilometre coastline and its reservoir network as untapped amphibious-aircraft territory. At the time it was a throwaway line in a speech about a landlocked Karnataka airport, easy to forget. For years, nothing visible followed it after the minister relinquished his office. This changed only recently.
The ministry introduced comprehensive guidelines for seaplane operations in 2024, and followed it with ‘UDAN 5.5’, a dedicated bidding round exclusively for seaplanes and helicopters. Letters of Intent have since been issued for 150 routes connecting 30 water aerodromes across coastal and island regions, precisely the geography the minister’s 2017 comment identified. This has a direct relevance to a state like Goa. The nine-year gap between the minister’s observation and the operational programme is itself a useful case study in how long regulatory groundwork actually takes to convert a well-stated ambition into implementation.
India’s third-place position refers specifically to the domestic aviation market for passengers travelling within the country. This doesn’t include the total traffic, where India ranked fifth in 2024 at 211 million total passengers. We are still behind the US, China, the UK and Spain, according to IATA’s World Air Transport Statistics. The broader economic footprint behind these numbers is sizeable. India’s civil aviation sector is estimated to contribute close to $6 billion directly to GDP and support a circular economic contribution of roughly $54 billion, alongside an estimated 370,000 direct jobs and 7.7 million indirect jobs, according to 2024 industry data compiled from IATA sources.
It is worth noting that the milestone was reached amid genuine turbulence rather than a smooth upward line. The July 2026 capacity data shows India’s domestic market itself contracting 4.6 per cent year-on-year that month, including for Goa, alongside similar contractions in the US, Japan and Australia. On the contrary, markets such as Mexico, Turkiye and China expanded. ICRA’s aviation outlook, revised from India’s outlook from stable to negative in March 2026, cited rising aviation turbine fuel costs and airspace disruptions tied to escalating tensions in West Asia.
This is precisely the kind of volatility that the ‘Modified UDAN’ scheme plans to even out. The modified scheme’s longer runway of support five years of tapered viability gap funding rather than three. This will help routes absorb without being abandoned at the first sign of demand softness. This is the mode the CAG had flagged in the original scheme.
UDAN was never a scheme without flaws in implementation. A CAG audit found that roughly half of UDAN’s original routes had been discontinued over time, as airlines withdrew once subsidies tapered or route-level demand failed to sustain itself. Whether five years of tapered support proves sufficient to make previously unviable routes commercially self-sustaining, or merely delays the reckoning by two more years, is a genuine open question that only the next audit cycle will answer.
Goa’s own position in this story is still being written. The Manohar International Airport at Mopa saw passenger numbers rise nearly 16 per cent in the 12 months to March 2026, even as broader capacity data for the state showed a year-on-year contraction in mid-2026. This is a reminder that national aggregate trends and state-level realities can move in different directions at the same time.
As the earlier visionary minister completes his first year at current constitutional position at the Goa Lok Bhavan this July 26, the more useful marker of his earlier ministry’s work is not the office he holds today but the decade of DGCA, ICRA, CAG and IATA data that evidences the great foundations that were laid.
(Prof Manoj S Kamat is Principal, Dempo College (Autonomous) and a policy analyst writing on finance, trade and public policy.)
