By Col Bhaskar Bharti (Retd)
‘India does not suffer from a lack of laws. It suffers from a lack of courage to enforce them’
In recent years, the Indian economy has undergone a quiet but consequential shift – from competitive markets to concentrated control, with monopolistic practices steadily entrenching themselves across critical sectors. What India is witnessing today is not organic market growth, but the slow normalisation of monopoly.
The recent Indigo fiasco was not merely an airline management failure or an unfortunate convergence of operational glitches. It was a warning flare, bright, loud, and impossible to ignore, exposing how dangerously concentrated India’s economic architecture has become. When one airline stumbles and the entire aviation ecosystem convulses, it is no longer a corporate problem. It is a governance failure. Yet aviation is only the most visible symptom. Beneath it lies a far more disturbing pattern: the systematic consolidation of India’s critical sectors into the hands of a select few business houses, enabled by policy choices, regulatory complacency, and institutional myopia. This is not free-market capitalism. It is crony consolidation masquerading as development.
The Myth of Scale, the Reality of Stranglehold
For over a decade, scale has been fetished as a virtue in Indian policymaking. Bigger airports, bigger ports, bigger energy players, bigger airlines – as if size alone guarantees efficiency and resilience. The Indigo episode punctures this myth. Scale without competition does not produce strength; it produces fragility. When dominance replaces diversity, the system loses its shock absorbers.
Aviation today is a near-monopoly in practice, even if not on paper. The result is predictable: reduced consumer choice, pricing power tilted against passengers, and a regulator that intervenes only after public outrage peaks. The invisible hand of the market has been replaced by a clenched fist.
Navi Mumbai Airport: Private Power, Public Helplessness
If the Indigo fiasco revealed market concentration, the Navi Mumbai Airport recent controversy reveals something even more dangerous – the unchecked power of private concessionaires over public infrastructure. Reports that the airport management demanded exorbitant fees from telecom providers, accompanied by threats of jamming services, should alarm every citizen.
An airport is not a mall. It is not a gated commercial enclave. It is critical national infrastructure. When a private entity can dictate terms to essential service providers, it exposes a deeper rot in concession design and regulatory oversight. The state appears to have outsourced not just infrastructure, but authority itself. This is not privatisation. It is abdication.
A Disturbing Pattern across Sectors
What we are witnessing is not accidental. It is structural — the outcome of policy choices that favour concentration over competition and convenience over caution.
- Telecom, once a vibrant battlefield of innovation and consumer choice, has been reduced to a fragile duopoly where competition is cosmetic and consumers are captive.
- Airports, increasingly handed over through long-term concessions to a handful of operators, now reflect private dominance over public infrastructure, with limited regulatory oversight and little accountability for service quality or pricing.
- Ports, the arteries of India’s trade, are steadily coming under the control of a few conglomerates, raising serious concerns about freight pricing, access discrimination, and national supply-chain vulnerability.
- Data infrastructure and digital platforms, the new oil of the economy, are being consolidated through control over networks, cloud services, platforms, and content distribution, creating gatekeepers in a domain that should remain open, neutral, and competitive.
- Mining, including coal and critical minerals, has seen concentration through selective allocations and integrated control over extraction, logistics, and downstream usage, narrowing entry and amplifying environmental and social risks.
- Agriculture is being corporatised at the procurement, storage, and logistics levels, marginalising farmers, cooperatives, and small traders while tilting bargaining power decisively towards large buyers.
- Renewable energy, ironically marketed as decentralised and democratic, is increasingly monopolised through preferential access to land, capital, and power purchase agreements, crowding out regional and smaller players.
- Defence manufacturing, under the banner of strategic autonomy, risks replacing foreign dependence with domestic oligarchy if competition, transparency, and vendor diversity are not actively enforced.
The script is the same everywhere: identify a sector, award long-term control to a few “trusted” players, weaken regulatory vigilance, and hope efficiency compensates for concentration. It never does.
Where are the Watchdogs?
The most uncomfortable question is also the most unavoidable: where are the regulators? Institutions like NITI Aayog, the Competition Commission of India, Sectoral Regulators, and Ministerial Oversight Bodies were created precisely to prevent this outcome. Yet they have either failed to foresee the consequences or chosen to look away. Market concentration is treated as acceptable collateral cost of growth rather than as a red flag demanding intervention.
This reflects a dangerous ideological drift – the belief that national interest is best served by nurturing a handful of corporate “champions”. History offers no support for this theory. Every economy that has succumbed to oligarchic dominance has paid the price in stagnation, inequality, and institutional decay.
Monopoly Is Not Efficiency – It Is Power
Let us be clear: monopolies are not efficient because they are better; they are efficient because they are unchallenged. They innovate less, listen less, and lobby more. Over time, they begin to shape policy itself, blurring the line between regulator and regulated.
When critical systems like airports, power grids, data networks, logistics corridors, are concentrated in too few hands, the nation becomes hostage to private risk. A financial miscalculation, labour dispute, or strategic error can paralyse entire sectors. This is not economic strength; it is systemic vulnerability.
What Must Change Immediately
If India is serious about protecting its economic future, cosmetic reforms will not suffice.
Break the Culture of Preferential Access
No business house should enjoy repeated, cross-sectoral dominance through opaque bidding or tailored policy frameworks.
Impose Hard Limits on Market Concentration
Especially in aviation, telecom, energy, and logistics, dominance thresholds must be enforced without exception.
Redesign Infrastructure Concessions
Ownership must not translate into coercive power over essential services operating within public infrastructure.
Hold Regulators Publicly Accountable
Regulatory inertia should attract scrutiny, not quiet acceptance.
Actively Nurture Competition
MSMEs and mid-sized players must be protected from being crushed by scale-driven monopolies.
Development without Democracy Is Just Control
India’s economic story cannot be reduced to the balance sheets of a few conglomerates. True development is measured by how resilient, fair, and competitive the system remains when stress arrives. The Indigo fiasco, far from being an isolated disruption, is a mirror held up to an uncomfortable truth. If monopolistic drift continues unchecked, India risks becoming an economy run for efficiency on paper but captured by profit in practice – a nation where markets exist, but competition does not. The choice is stark: regulate now or regret later. History will not be kind to those who confuse consolidation with progress.
(The author is an army veteran and a social commentator. He is an alumnus of National Defence Academy and Indian Military Academy. He is a Post Graduate in HRM and Journalism and Mass Communication. He is based in Dehradun.)
