United Arab Emirates is perhaps the only country in the world with which India has multiple bilateral air services agreements, emirate wise. The usual practice is for two countries to have only one such agreement which covers airlines operating from each country.
But only in the case of UAE does India inexplicably ink such pacts separately with each emirate.We have already seen how this discriminatory practice has bled Indian carriers - two of UAE's largest airlines, Emirates and Etihad Airways - have been carrying Indians in droves to their respective hubs of Dubai and Abu Dhabi before providing them onward connections to the Americas and Europe.
This, of course, has bled Indian airlines like Air India which could have carried this traffic had the Government not been generous with flying rights to the two UAE airlines with deep pockets.But a decision taken recently by Civil Aviation Minister A Gajapathi Raju may finally reverse this trend of fawning over foreign carriers, at the risk of putting our own airlines in trouble as per an article in Firstpost.
A source says the ministry has rejected Air Arabia's demand of being allowed to use flying rights accorded to the designated carrier of Ras Al Khaimah, an emirate of UAE. Ras al Khaimah's own airline, RAK Airways, shut down last year after which the emirate petitioned India for allowing Air Arabia to operate 14,000 seats a week between itself and various Indian cities."We have rejected this proposal. Our Indian airlines are unable to use seats provided to them under bilateral pacts and this situation needs to be corrected. Air Arabia is the designated airline for Sharjah, why allow it to fly from Ras al Khaimah?," this source said.
Not just Air Arabia, it seems the minister has been routinely denying any increase to other middle-eastern airlines as well. The source quoted above said Emirates wanted to increase its points of call in India but its request has also not been approved. As per a CAPA research report earlier this year, Emirates already operates to 10 Indian cities and in March this year, India and Dubai agreed to increase bilateral weekly seats between the two countries by 20% in phased manner.
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