A bio-organic disinfection tunnel at the Kempegowda International Airport, Bangalore
After a ban of nearly three months, India is all set to open its skies to foreign carriers, in a limited manner though, to begin with.
On March 22, the Indian government had closed all airports in the country to international and domestic carriers in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, the government has allowed only selective Indian carriers, mainly the national carrier, Air India, to operate some chartered flights under the Vande Bharat Mission to ferry Indians stranded overseas. Initially, most governments did not bother and cooperated with India in operating these flights.
However, as these are chartered flights, rather than the regularly scheduled flights, the flights have become a rather lucrative operation for the struggling national carrier. Hence, after over 200 such flights, the foreign carriers, notably in the US and the EU complained to their governments seeking a part of the action as well. Now, faced with mounting pressure from foreign governments that they would ban Air India from operating any more charters to their countries. Thus, the ministry of civil aviation says it may establish bilateral agreements with a few countries resulting in resuming international flights.
Though the government has not given any timeframe, it is likely that the flights could resume as early as mid-July and perhaps to the US, the UK and Europe.
Besides India, several countries are exploring travel bubbles or bilateral air bridges to serve emergency travel. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania rolled out a three-way travel bubble by opening their borders to each other in May. Fiji is exploring a travel bubble with neighbouring Australia and New Zealand, the two countries that it relies heavily on for tourism revenue. Malaysia is exploring a similar arrangement with other South-East Asian countries. And the UK is considering the same for Greece, Spain and Portugal, while Thailand is mulling a regional travel bubble with New Zealand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Laos, Myanmar, South Korea and Vietnam.
