May Jurisdictional Update – India
Returning to Normal
Ramesh Vaidyanathan, on behalf of Advaya Legal: It’s slowly getting back to normal here, and school vacations are causing the hospitality sector to do very well. Traffic has picked up. We have seen airports increasing revenue, which is good, as well as a lot of expansion projects and new airport privatization projects. Mostly these are state-run airports being handed over to the private sector through a ppp process.
In terms of covid, the financial year ending March 31 was quite bad for the airlines, as you can imagine, but there is a lot of hope for the coming period.
Jet Airways is coming back later this year after coming out of the bankruptcy process. Air India is being privatized. Air India wasn’t able to take full advantage of its “Miles and More” memberships and things of that sort, but hopefully more now may change with it becoming privatized.
Another new airline, Akasha, is now operating.
Overall, the economy is looking more competitive, but not profitable due to airport and fuel charges. This is a huge fast-growing market with tremendous rising pressure.
The legal business has been slow, with the expectation that things will pick up.