The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has served a show-cause notice to IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers on why enforcement action should not be initiated against him for the massive cancellations leading to disruption in the essential service and inconvenience to the passengers. “You failed in your duty,” the show-cause notice, issued yesterday, said.

The show-cause notice has been sent to the IndiGo CEO, a source confirmed to Fortune India. “It has been observed that scheduled flights of IndiGo Airlines have recently faced massive disruptions resulting in severe inconvenience, hardship, and distress to passengers. It has also been noted that the primary cause of the said flight description is non-provisioning of adequate arrangements to cater to the revised requirements for smooth implementation of the approved FDTL scheme for the airline,” the notice said.

“Such large-scale operational failures indicate significant lapses and planning oversight and resource management and is prima facie non-compliance on part of the airline,” the notice added.

“The airline has failed to provide requisite information and facilities to their passengers. As the CEO, you are responsible for ensuring effective management of the airlines but you failed in your duty to ensure timely arrangements for conduct of reliable operations and available of requisite facilities to the passengers,” it added.  

“Now, therefore, you are hereby directed to show cause between 24 hours of receipt of this notice as to why appropriate enforcement action should not be initiated against you under relevant provisions of the Aircraft Rules and Civil Aviation requirements for the above-mentioned violations,” said the notice.

“Failure to submit your reply within the stipulated period shall result in the matter being decided ex-parte,” it added.

Civil aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu said on Saturday morning that all the airlines except IndiGo implemented the FDTL scheme and the government will “take strict” action against the guilty. The ministry has also set up an inquiry into the disruption which continues.

It may be noted that IndiGo yesterday said it operated 1,500 flights by the end of the day, compared with over 700 on Friday. “Addressing the recent disruptions in our network, we had cancelled a significant number of flights and operated little above 700 flights yesterday connecting 113 destinations. The main objective was to reboot the network, systems, and rosters so that we could start afresh today with higher number of flights, improved stability, and there are some early signs of improvement. Today, we are on our way to operate over 1,500 flights by end of day,” it said in a statement issued yesterday evening.