On 22 September twenty-odd states signed MoUs for the next UDAN decade that's very ambitious but does that mean civil aviation growth of passengers or not. 100 airstrips to become airports, 200 helipads, five years of viability money instead of three. The Centre will pay for much of the concrete. The states, civil aviation secretary Samir Sinha said, must deliver land, roads, public transport, security and fire. That sentence is the makes the headlines apart from the ribbon-cutting. India already knows how to count aerodromes. It has not published how many people can reach one in ninety minutes on a wet Tuesday night without a private car.
An airport that exists on the map can still be a four-hour bus, a closed hill road, or an ambulance that cannot make the last ten kilometres after dark. Official catchments assume a radius. Passengers live on a timetable. Monsoon, no last bus, no rail head and the catchment collapses to whoever owns a vehicle. Regional airlines then fly empty or not at all and the reboot of 'underserved' UDAN fields becomes another subsidy to the same few towns that could already get there.
The useful audit is door-to-terminal, not district-to-pin. Ask the bus operator, the district hospital and the family travelling for a court date what the journey actually is. If the state cannot answer that before it nominates the next strip on the challenge portal, India will keep adding airports that the aam nagrik still cannot use.