Government has been constantly paying attention to civil aviation and has a policy to address aviation infrastructure development in place. But, India’s general aviation map needs to be paid attention. The country has hundreds of airstrips and aerodromes but fewer see anything like regular scheduled or charter operations. The rest are colonial strips, disused military fields, sugarcane landing grounds. Though UDAN has done enough and is moving strongly with 95 airports, some of its revival projects never moved past the inauguration stage.
The Airports Authority of India’s own data and Ministry replies draw the outline. India has about 487 airports and airstrips in total but only 149 to 164 operational aerodromes where civil flying actually happens depending on the specific cut of the data. Under UDAN, 651 to 669 routes have been launched since 2017, linking 95 airports and a handful of heliports and water aerodromes.
On the ground, that attrition shows up as idle facilities. Of the 95 airports revived under UDAN, 15 are currently non‑operational, including Pathankot, Pakyong, Kushinagar, Aligarh, Azamgarh, Chitrakoot, Shravasti, Moradabad, Bhavnagar, Ambikapur, Rourkela, Ludhiana, Datia, Kalaburagi and Shimla. Beyond that is a larger universe of strips owned by states private companies and the Defence Ministry like Jharkhand’s Dhalbhumgarh was one example, part of a pool of roughly 400 abandoned airstrips that Civil Aviation officials once said they wanted to renovate. When you add these layers together, you get a picture in which a few dozen places function steadily, a few dozen flicker on and off, and hundreds lie quiet.
The reasons are not mysterious they are written into parliamentary replies and CAG reports. Viability gap funding under UDAN ends after three years. In theory, routes are supposed to become self‑sustaining by then. In reality, only seven to ten percent of UDAN routes remained viable once subsidies stopped. Many airports see their only operator walk away as soon as guaranteed support tapered citing low passenger load factors, aircraft shortages and better returns on busier trunk routes. Therefore, subsidies have to be a constant feature or viability gap funding should be framed for 10 years at least with interest subvention on operational or capext loans to those airlines which operate routes continuously.
Other constraints are operational. Several revived airports are VFR‑only with poor visibility and weather making reliable schedules difficult. Some have daytime runway closures or short strips that limit equipment types. Leasing issues, maintenance delays and slow progress on terminal and CNS infrastructure add friction. In a market where airlines can fill A320s between major cities and still complain about fuel costs thin turboprop routes from a marginal airfield are hard to justify.
There is also a deeper design problem. Many UDAN routes and airstrip revival projects were chosen for political or symbolic reasons rather than hard demand modelling. The spillover from the highway and rail world that does not translate cleanly to aviation economics. An airstrip that exists because a colonial army needed it or because a sugar mill built it in the 1950s may have little natural traffic today.
First, honest demand mapping. The parliamentary panel on civil aviation has already urged the ministry to commission independent impact assessments that look at cost per passenger, route‑wise viability and self‑sustainability. That kind of work needs to be done airstrip by airstrip where do people actually want to go and what payloads and aircraft can the strip realistically handle.
Many of unused strips are perfect for smaller general aviation types, flight training, air taxi operations or helicopter circuits and not for Airbus or Boeing or ATRs, so there is a need to pay attention to that infrastructure. A serious plan needs to be in place to develop smaller airstrips for small aircraft instead of forcing commercial airline to land. Make these small airstrips economical without compromising with basic safety and equip them with proper aviation navigation infrastructure.
India’s 700‑plus airstrips are sunk costs in concrete and asphalt. The choice now is between letting them slowly decay as a footnote in old files or doing the hard work of turning a scattered legacy into a usable general aviation map.