Aviation in India is a rare thing – a definite growth industry. But there is an interesting story within this story. South – Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil NaduKarnataka and Kerala – dominate aviation. Any way you slice and dice the data, the Southern states fly far above every other region together. And most of these changes have happened in the last 10 years. At the same time, in some ways, the southern aviation market is beginning to resemble the mature markets of advanced countries.
Southern rules, domestic or international
Get recent data. Between April 2025 and March 2026, 41 out of every 100 international passengers crossing India’s borders did so through the southern airport. According to Airports Authority of India numbers, 28 were handled in the northern region, including Delhi, and 25 in the west, including Mumbai.The domestic picture is equally shocking. Despite the fact that India’s two busiest airports, Delhi and Mumbai, are located in the northern and western regions, the southern airports carried 10 million more passengers than the North and 1.44 crore more passengers than the West.Interestingly, a decade ago, the race was much tighter. The West leads the way with about five crore annual domestic passengers, followed by the North with 48 million and the South with 46 million. But by 2024-25, the south has crossed the 10 crore domestic passenger mark. Other areas are still waiting to get there.
Source: Airports Authority of India
Graphic: Sanjeev Kumarapuram
Below the Vindhyas, it’s like America or Japan
This is not just a story of bigger airports or fuller flights. This is the story of an aviation market that has matured in a different way.The government’s UDAN scheme, whose first flight began in April 2017, is perhaps the clearest map yet of where Indian aviation still needs help. Of the 923 routes awarded at the national level, UP alone has 96 routes, while Uttarakhand has 81 routes. According to data from Rajya Sabha answers, these two states have been granted more routes than all the southern states combined.But rewarding routes is one thing. Survival is another matter.In Uttar Pradesh, UDAN flights started on 56 routes, but 20 were closed within three years, the highest number of closures for any state. After this, there are 16 closed routes in Uttarakhand, and 12 closed routes in Assam. The contrast with the South is obvious. AAI and UDAN data shows that southern India has a more mature aviation market, where even smaller airports generate sustainable demand throughout the year.In this sense, parts of southern India are beginning to resemble the aviation ecosystem seen in countries like the US, Japan, Canada, Australia and Norway.In the US, a traveler from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, can board a regional flight to Chicago, connect with a domestic jet service to New York, and then continue on a long-haul international flight to Delhi. In Japan, turboprops connect remote islands and regional centers such as Tokunoshima to Kagoshima, ferrying passengers to larger national centres. The defining characteristic of such systems is a seamless progression: small regional aircraft, then domestic jet services, then international long-haul flights.This structure is now increasingly visible in the south.Take the textile hub Rajahmundry, often called the “Bombay of the South”. IndiGo and fly91 together operate 10 flights daily from Hyderabad to the city. It is a distance of one hour on ATR plane, while it is about seven hours by road. The first ATR leaves Hyderabad for Rajahmundry at 6.50 am; The last one departs at 8pm. Rajahmundry is also connected to Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai by non-stop flights.The comparison with Cedar Rapids is instructive. This city in Iowa, the world’s largest corn processing center, is connected to Chicago with eight daily non-stop flights, albeit by fast regional jets. Like the case of Cedar Rapids, Rajahmundry’s network shows how deeply air connectivity is beginning to penetrate.Compare this with airports serving similar-sized cities in other parts of India, and the South’s distinctive aviation model becomes clear. The region has what analysts might call the full aviation stack: regional turboprops connecting smaller cities, narrow-body jets on trunk routes between state capitals and major metropolises, and a strong international layer on top of them. Each level nourishes the next level.This is a structure that the North and West, despite all their traffic volumes, have not yet replicated on a large scale.Consider IndiGo, India’s largest airline. According to an aviation official, the airline deploys about 60% of its regional ATR turboprop fleet at just three stations: Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai.
What makes the South a leader?
Aviation experts who spoke to TOI cited the economic dynamism of the South as the main reason.“Demand in the South is not dependent on one or two large metros, but is distributed across a network of economically active cities… with strong interconnectedness across technology, manufacturing, healthcare, education and exports,” said Ashish Chhawchharia, partner, Grant Thornton India. “This creates a more flexible and diverse traffic base than in areas where demand is concentrated around a few centers or seasonal travel.“Tamil Nadu has Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, Tiruchirappalli, Salem and Thoothukudi, each independently continuing regular scheduled flight services. Karnataka has Bengaluru, Mysuru, Hubli and Belagavi. Andhra Pradesh has Vijayawada, Tirupati, Rajahmundry, Cuddapah and Kurnool.The aviation official quoted earlier said, “These are not subsidized experiments in regional connectivity. These are commercial decisions because the demand is there, day-by-day, flight-by-flight.”Supriyo Banerjee, vice-president and co-group head, corporate ratings, ICRA, said the South’s passenger strength lies in its economic structure, airport infrastructure network and the presence of major cities, which generate frequent business trips to both domestic and international destinations.The dominance of IT services, with Bengaluru and Hyderabad emerging as major hubs for customer-facing technology roles, along with the region’s start-up and venture capital ecosystem, have helped boost international traffic and short-haul domestic travel between southern metros, he said.Chhawchharia said a key difference for the South is early “industrialization” in sectors that promote high-frequency air travel, particularly IT services, global capability centres, electronics, pharmaceuticals and advanced manufacturing. These industries attract talent from across the country, leading to steady air traffic to cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai.“These cities act as national trade gateways with deep domestic and international connectivity needs. Also, tier-2 markets are more integrated into the formal economy, sustaining demand beyond metro-to-metro routes,” he said.As the number of GCCs continues to grow across the region and data center investment increases, the demand base continues to grow. “Economically stable routes provide more stable, recurring passenger flows over time,” Chhawchharia said.UDAN data reinforces that point. The north has a larger operational UDAN network with 215 routes, while the south has 141 routes. But it has also seen a lot of route decay. The routes closed in the north amount to 26% of its operational network. In the South this figure is only 12%. Kerala leads the flight success list, with 12 routes operational and none closed.
Source: Rajya Sabha
Kerala (aviation) story
However, Kerala’s contribution to the South’s aviation dominance comes from a very different engine: international traffic.In Kozhikode, 76% of all passengers are international passengers. In Thiruvananthapuram, international passengers outnumber domestic passengers, 53% to 47%. At most Indian airports, including Delhi and Mumbai, the usual split is around 30% international and 70% domestic. Kerala’s overseas traffic, driven mainly by its Gulf links and migration economy, is a major reason why the southern states have accounted for about 40% of India’s international traffic for at least a decade.
Airports matter too
Infrastructure has also played a decisive role in the South’s aviation success story.Delhi and Mumbai have been operating beyond comfortable capacity for decades, their terminals and runways long stretched with demand exceeding supply. Both cities have recently started addressing the problem, with Navi Mumbai airport set to become operational in December 2025 and Noida-Jewar airport scheduled to begin operations this month, reforms that were pending for decades.In contrast, the South entered the modern airport era with new runways and cleaner blueprints. Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport and Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport are both greenfield facilities that opened in 2008. They were purpose-built, modern airports designed for growth, unlike Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, whose infrastructure has been burdened by seven or eight decades of incremental expansion.Today, four of India’s ten busiest airports in terms of passenger traffic are in the south: Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kochi. No other region matches that concentration. Bengaluru is already planning a huge second airport. Visakhapatnam is also preparing for its next chapter, with the Bhogapuram International Airport expected to open soon. It will serve a city rapidly emerging as a hub of artificial intelligence, data centers and global capability centres, attracting investments from companies including Google, Reliance, TCS, Infosys and Capgemini, among others.
figures rounded off
Reversing aviation history
Undoubtedly, Indian aviation began its commercial journey in the West. In 1932, JRD Tata flew his historic air mail service from Karachi to Mumbai via Ahmedabad. For decades thereafter, Mumbai was India’s busiest airport, and the western corridor remained the center of gravity of Indian flying: the busiest route, the densest traffic, the headquarters of the national carrier.But Mumbai’s congested airport could not keep up with the demand. Around the turn of the century, Delhi became the busiest airport in the country.Now, that geography of dominance has been redrawn.The signs started appearing in AAI’s own segment’s revenue data as early as 2007–08. That year, the South earned a revenue of Rs 1,538 crore, the highest of any region in the country, exceeding the West’s Rs 1,150 crore and the North’s Rs 995 crore. In the years since, the South has only strengthened its lead.Indian aviation had once pivoted from west to north, from the old dominance of Mumbai to the rise of Delhi. The next chapter is being written in the south between business cities, temple towns, gulf gateways, textile hubs, technology hubs and new airports.South isn’t just adding passengers. It is creating a whole new aviation system.
