This column is a follow up as a reader and a frequent flier pointed out that I had missed mentioning AirSewa in my previous column and narrated this story. Due to a lack of options late evening, he had booked an Alliance Air flight from Bengaluru to Goa. Anticipating Bengaluru’s notorious evening traffic, he headed for the airport as early as 5 pm for an 8 pm flight. The passengers boarded around 8.30 pm, sat for 90 minutes in a packed narrow-body aircraft with no air conditioning, and at 10 pm deboarded as the technical trouble it developed could not be resolved.

A group of inexperienced airlines staff was left to deal with 70-odd angry passengers; they could neither resolve nor mitigate the situation. Many fliers had nowhere to stay for the night and some of the women travelling alone were even wary of taking taxis to return to the main city at such a late hour. With safety records of Indian metros being the way they are, he said that the plight of a young 25-year-old girl travelling alone struck him as particularly worrisome as the airline washed its hands off the whole fiasco. Moreover, for no fault of theirs, almost all the passengers paid substantially more for flights the next day as these were booked at the last minute.

After he returned the next day to Goa, he decided to log onto AirSewa to register a complaint against the airline’s poor handling of the episode. And that’s where the second ordeal began. Despite trying to log in for 45 minutes each time over three consecutive days - he tried once in the morning and once again in the evening assuming the site was malfunctioning - he found he simply could not log in. The site asked for email and phone validation and then went into a loop. Until this piece went was published, he had failed to log in to AirSewa to register his grievances.

That’s when I decided to attempt logging in to the service myself and spent around 30 minutes on two different days with no success. Upon further investigation, I found that this service - I had in fact clean forgotten about it since nobody ever mentions it - was launched by the government in November 2016 but had done such a poor job that almost nobody in the industry was aware of it or had tried to avail of it.

Official AirSewa figures tell a different story about how the portal functions. Murlidhar Mohol, the minister of state for civil aviation, recently told Parliament that AirSewa, received 50,620 complaints against airlines and resolved 50,539 of them from January 1, 2021 to December 3, 2024.

A senior government official privately said that he had received more complaints than that on his email during his five-year tenure at Rajiv Gandhi Bhawan. In a country with over 130 million travelling in a year, complaints in thousands sound absurd even to the authorities.

As things stand, this matter - like virtually every other matter - has fallen in the laps of the overwrought Indian courts. In response to a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by an NGO highlighting the portal’s failure to adequately address grievances, particularly affecting NRIs and citizens abroad, who have no option but to depend on the platform for redressal of travel-related issues, the Delhi High Court has since directed the civil aviation ministry to tackle the inefficiencies of the AirSewa portal within a specified time frame.

Since the matter is currently under discussion, I have a few suggestions to make. One, compare Digiyatra and AirSewa. Hasn’t the roll out and success of Digiyatra taught us something? Some things - especially complex tech based digital solutions - are best tackled in conjunction or solely by a private provider, not by bureaucrats sitting in government offices.

Two, with India poised to soon be the world’s third largest aviation market, a tech- based app housed in Delhi’s Rajiv Gandhi Bhawan might not be the ideal or sensible way forward in any case. Instead of struggling to provide a technology-led solution that works on good days and fails on bad, why doesn’t the government consider a more holistic approach? Give the sector an ombudsman or a regulatory authority with some teeth. As I have pointed out in a previous piece in this space: the DGCA, MOCA and the department of consumer affairs are neither equipped nor designed to tackle this.

And last but not least, is it too much to ask or insist on transparency in charges and accountability in actions from both airlines and airports through whatever leeway the system has on them? Too often, the authorities seem more on the side of the industry than of the passenger. This is not just a pity but a tragedy viewed through a wider lens. As Oscar Wilde once famously said, it is not the prisoners that need reformation; it is the prisons.

Anjuli Bhargava writes on governance, infrastructure and the social sector.The views expressed are personal.