By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
Davos (Switzerland) : India’s Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said Wednesday the country could not afford to open up its domestic skies immediately to foreign airlines, but added this would happen “eventually.”
Reacting to a demand made by Virgin boss Richard Branson who accompanied British Premier Gordon Brown to India recently, Patel said Indian companies need to time to grow and consolidate before the domestic sector could be opened up to foreign airlines.
“Carriers need scale and size,” he said.
“It (opening up) will happen eventually, but even then it’s not going to be 100 per cent,” Patel told IANS on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) taking place in this Swiss ski resort.
“Even in the United States, the domestic sector is only opened up to around 35 percent.”
Patel is here as part of an 80-strong Indian delegation that includes a ministerial trio of him, delegation leader and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath, as well as a large number of front-ranking corporate leaders.
Patel said the aviation sector in India was set to become the next “sunshine industry” after information technology and telecommunications and needed to attract 10 billion dollars of investment in infrastructure.
The industry, he said, had posted an annual growth rate of 40 percent.
“There is no new airport being built in either Europe or the US, whereas India’s needs are to build or upgrade 500 airports in the next 10 years,” he said.
Patel said his key focus in Davos would be to attract investments in Indian infrastructure.