In March 2020, the Government of India announced a lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to curtail the spread of the virus, all domestic flights were halted. It has now been 10 months since domestic travel resumed in India.
According to the Airports Authority of India (AAI), 5.35 crore people have travelled on about 5 lakh flights since the resumption of flight operations, pegging traffic back at pre-Covid-19 levels
However, since February 2021, the country has seen a resurgence in Covid-19 cases and this has impacted passenger traffic, according to data shared by the AAI. Although metro cities have seen reduced amounts of passengers, tier 2, 3 and 4 cities have been outliers.
In January, 14 cities and now in March, 16 cities have surpassed their pre-Covid-19 passenger traffic.
Cities such as Dibrugarh, Rajkot, Dimapur and Kishangarh saw passenger traffic back at pre-Covid levels. Alongside passenger traffic, cargo movement has also significantly improved at airports such as Srinagar, Dibrugarh, Port Blair, Coimbatore and Trivandrum, according to the data.
Fourteen of the 16 airports on the list, improved upon their performance from January 2021. These included Srinagar, Jharsguda, Kalaburagi and Leh. The two airports that did not make it to the list was Pathankot and Gorakhpur.
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