When IndiGo cancelled thousands of flights this December—stranding lakhs of passengers, destroying travel plans, and exposing India’s vulnerability to a quasi-monopoly airline—it was tempting to blame it all on one company’s “rogue behaviour”.

But scratching the surface reveals a deeper malaise: a chronic weakening of India’s regulatory institutions and a form of tainted capitalism where dominant private players face little real accountability. The crisis was not an aberration; it was an inevitability.

Indian regulators are meant to be quasi-judicial bodies—independent, evidence-driven, and powerful enough to discipline the biggest corporations. In principle, they play a role analogous to courts: interpreting rules, enforcing compliance, and protecting public interest. In practice, most regulators resemble departments inside ministries, staffed by junior officers who simply cannot stand up to billion-dollar incumbents.

Contrast this with the United States, where even a junior federal judge could issue adverse rulings against the sitting President Donald Trump and his whimsical tariffs. In India, the median regulatory staffer is neither empowered nor insulated. They are expected to regulate conglomerates, whose annual profits exceed the regulator’s entire budget and whose influence networks reach deep within the government.

The result is predictable: regulatory hesitation, delayed enforcement, and a culture of looking away until a crisis becomes impossible to ignore.

Long before the present airline fiasco, take the case of telecom, inching toward duopoly, which also offers a clear example. Over the past two decades, spectrum auctions were repeatedly followed by post-hoc rule changes—in pricing, revenue sharing, Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR), and merger norms. Policy shifts came not through transparent processes but through continuous firefighting and lobbying. Companies bet on getting rules changed later, because history suggested they would. Regulation was characterised by volatility, not predictability.

This is the........

© Free Press Journal