In late January, a plane crash in interior Maharashtra, which killed the state’s deputy chief minister, Ajit Pawar, triggered a political crisis. It also threw the spotlight on a largely unnoticed sector.

Private charter flights, run by aviation companies with a non-scheduled operators’ permit (NSOP), are essential to how powerful people move within the country. That business is built on their urgency.

Politicians use it to hop across multiple districts in a day, and industrialists rely on it to reach factories far beyond........

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