Start with the arithmetic. A passenger books air tickets worth ₹12,488, cancels them shortly after discovering he has selected the wrong travel dates, and receives ₹3,054 back — a refund of roughly 24 paise on the rupee. The cancellation fees and ancillary deductions consumed the rest. That single transaction — ordinary, unremarkable, replicated across millions of Indian air travellers every year — is now the factual kernel of a case that has reached the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal and may force India to answer a structural question it has deferred since aviation liberalisation began: who governs airline pricing conduct when the market has consolidated into a duopoly?
The appellant is Kannadiputhur Sundararaman Suresh, who filed the original complaint before the Competition Commission of India arguing that IndiGo and Air India — carriers that together account for over 90% of India's domestic aviation market — abused their market position by imposing excessive cancellation charges. His legal theory was dual: the similarity in cancellation fee structures between the two carriers reflected cartelization under Section 3 of the Competition Act, and each airline individually abused its dominant position under Section 4. The CCI, in a March 2026 order, closed the matter at the preliminary stage under Section 26(2), finding no prima facie case worthy of a Director General investigation.
What the CCI Actually Said
The Commission's reasoning deserves close reading, because it reveals as much about the limits of Indian competition law as about the merits of this particular complaint. On the cartelization charge, the CCI held that similar pricing policies alone were insufficient to establish any agreement, arrangement, understanding or concerted practice between the two airlines. Parallel conduct is not collusion — a principle well-established in competition law globally. On the dominance charge, the Commission observed that a high combined market share of competing enterprises does not automatically establish dominance or anti-competitive conduct under the Competition Act. The regulator read the statute correctly: Section 4 applies to an individual enterprise that holds a dominant position, not to two competing firms whose aggregate share happens to be large.
Both conclusions are legally defensible. Neither is entirely satisfying. The CCI's framework was built for markets with a single dominant player; it handles bilateral oligopolies with less agility. Two carriers, each below the threshold that triggers dominance concerns individually, can together create a pricing environment that leaves consumers with no meaningful exit — book with IndiGo under its cancellation terms, or book with Air India under terms that look nearly identical. The formal absence of an agreement between them does not dissolve the practical absence of consumer choice.
The Jurisdictional Vacuum
Here is where the structural fault-line opens. India's aviation sector is regulated by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, which has in the past issued guidance on fares and ancillary fees. The Competition Commission operates as a horizontal regulator across all sectors, empowered to address both anti-competitive agreements and abuse of dominance. In theory, the two frameworks complement each other; in practice, the boundary between them is unresolved — and sophisticated legal teams at large airlines know exactly how to navigate that ambiguity. When DGCA issues fare guidance, airlines can argue that commercial pricing discretion belongs outside the sector regulator's operational remit. When a CCI complaint arrives, airlines can point to the absence of a formal cartel agreement and to the technical threshold for individual dominance. The consumer, caught between two regulators whose jurisdictions do not overlap cleanly, finds that the sum of both is less than either.
This is not a trivial administrative design problem. India's domestic air passenger volumes have crossed 150 million annually, according to DGCA data cited in the lens analysis for this case. At that scale, even a structural tendency toward excessive ancillary fees represents a significant aggregate transfer from passengers to carriers — not through any single dramatic act of abuse, but through the quiet arithmetic of cancellation charges, baggage fees, and seat-selection premiums levied in a market where the choice is effectively: pay, or don't fly.
Air India's Second Life and the Tata Complication
The post-privatisation dimension adds texture the CCI's order cannot fully address. Air India's return to the Tata Group was positioned as the corrective to decades of state-owned inefficiency — a private operator that would compete on service quality and rebuild the carrier's international standing. That narrative is largely intact. What it obscures is that privatisation, in a market already consolidated around IndiGo, produced not competitive pressure but duopoly reinforcement. The incentive structures under state ownership and under private ownership differ dramatically in operational terms; in pricing terms, the outcome for a passenger seeking a refund may be functionally similar. Analysts working on competition and consumer welfare have noted this pattern: India's aviation sector was liberalised without a commensurate strengthening of the consumer-protection and competition architecture needed to govern the concentration that liberalisation produced.
The EU's approach, under Regulation 1008/2008, mandates full-price transparency from the point of first fare display — the obligation to show the total price, including all taxes and fees, before a consumer enters any booking flow. India has no equivalent statutory requirement of comparable specificity. An Indian passenger selecting the wrong travel dates, as Suresh did, discovers the true cost of cancellation only after the transaction. The informational asymmetry at the moment of booking is structural, and it compounds whatever pricing power the carriers already hold.
What NCLAT Must Weigh
The appeal before NCLAT's Delhi bench — listed on Monday but not taken up due to paucity of time — will ask the appellate tribunal to determine whether the CCI applied the right legal standard at the preliminary stage. Suresh seeks to set aside the March 2026 order and direct the CCI to investigate. That is a meaningful distinction: he is not asking NCLAT to declare the airlines guilty of anything; he is asking it to rule that the CCI was wrong to close the door before an investigation began.
If NCLAT agrees and remands the matter for DG investigation, it opens a process that could constrain pricing discretion for carriers in concentrated markets and set precedent for how Section 4 applies when two firms together make competitive exit impossible for consumers. If it upholds the CCI's dismissal, the jurisdictional vacuum is entrenched — and the message to the market is that duopoly pricing behaviour in aviation falls outside effective competition oversight so long as no formal agreement between carriers can be demonstrated.
Neither outcome resolves the underlying legislative gap. Parliament's standing committee overseeing transport and aviation has the tools to commission a structured review of how ancillary fee disclosure norms operate across the sector and where DGCA's mandate ends and CCI's begins. That clarification does not require waiting for NCLAT's judgment; it can proceed in parallel. The UDAN scheme — India's stated policy instrument for affordable air connectivity — cannot deliver on its premise if the pricing environment at the duopoly level systematically erodes whatever fare benefit the scheme creates further down the demand curve. Regulatory architecture and policy aspiration need to point in the same direction. Right now, in Indian aviation, they do not.
