Ajay Singh, Chairman and Managing Director of SpiceJet on Budget 2018

The FM has proposed an ambitious scheme, NABH Nirman, to expand airport capacity by five times to 1 billion trips a year. India has about 125 airports today. This number can go up to 700.
This initiative has the potential to transform the Indian aviation sector and make India a global aviation superpower. The initiative will help to connect smaller towns and cities and increase tourism and economic activity like never before.
I am pleased that the Finance Minister has recognized our experiment with Seaplanes and its viability in promoting tourism and emergency medical care.This project has the potential to convert every river into a runway and every pond into an airport thus providing hundreds of thousands of airports to the country.
The FM mentioned one of his government’s most successful initiatives, UDAN. Being the country’s largest regional operator, SpiceJet, has played a leading role in this initiative which will connect 56 unserved airports and 31 unserved helipads in the next six months. SpiceJet was the only airline that did not seek viability gap funding from the government in UDAN-I thus setting an example for others.
UDAN is a grand scheme and we are happy that SpiceJet is helping realise Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of ensuring that every Indian can fly. It has been our constant endeavour to enable the common man to fly since we began operations 12 years back. We will connect many more small towns and cities through UDAN in times to come.