Rahul Bhatia and Family

IndiGo made Indian aviation dependable in the best possible way: on time, low cost, consistently profitable.

IndiGo was founded in 2006 with a model borrowed from the low-cost carriers that had transformed aviation in Europe and the United States: a single aircraft type, standardised operations, high daily utilisation of each plane, and fares set low enough to attract passengers who would otherwise travel by train. Rahul Bhatia and his late co-founder Rakesh Gangwal applied that model to India, a market with a large middle class, overcrowded railways and historically expensive air travel. Within a decade, IndiGo had become the dominant domestic airline, a position it has held since, with a market share now above 60%.

The business is not the most profitable airline in the world by absolute margin, but it is among the most consistently profitable in a sector where consistency is unusual. The single-fleet discipline of operating the Airbus A320 family almost exclusively controls maintenance costs, simplifies pilot training and enables a procurement scale that smaller carriers cannot match. With a fleet expansion to over 600 aircraft planned by 2030, the group is now testing whether its cost disciplines hold as the network extends to longer international routes.