The air travel disruption triggered by IndiGo in December 2025 exposed something far deeper than an operational breakdown in a large airline. It revealed a systemic governance breakdown across three critical pillars—the board, the leadership team, and the regulator—of India’s aviation ecosystem. And, each element deserves scrutiny.

When an airline that operates more than half of India’s daily flights experiences such a sudden collapse in readiness, it cannot be dismissed as merely an “operational issue.” It highlights deeper questions about how we govern large, complex, public-impact enterprises.

A question for the board: What oversight was exercised?

The new crew duty-time norms were announced well in advance, and their operational impact on India’s largest airline was significant and predictable. This raises necessary governance questions: did the board fully understand the implications of the regulatory changes, did it ask management for a detailed readiness plan, did it identify vulnerabilities in IndiGo’s tightly optimised operating model, and did it establish a structured mechanism to review preparedness and mitigate risk? Boards exist not only for high-level governance but for focussed risk governance, execution oversight, and ensuring resilience. In public-impact sectors, transparency and accountability from the top become essential, not optional.

Leadership accountability: Acceptance without clarity is not enough

IndiGo’s leadership has accepted responsibility, but the deeper “why” remains unanswered. Key questions that matter for institutional learning include why the organisation was not ready for a known regulatory change, whether there were internal ‘red flag’ signals that were missed, what assumptions guided the readiness assessments, and what was reviewed at the top level. A company of IndiGo’s scale operates as a national utility, and the public, employees, and the wider ecosystem deserve to understand the root causes, not for blame, but to understand how such a failure became possible.

The regulator’s role: Rules require readiness oversight

Effective regulation requires more than issuing guidelines; it requires active oversight of readiness. So we must ask whether readiness milestones were established, whether airlines were required to demonstrate preparedness, whether DGCA assessed airlines’ preparedness before the new norms took effect, and whether it intervened earlier when gaps became obvious. If IndiGo was unprepared, the regulator should have known. If it knew, then it should have intervened earlier. This is a governance gap on the regulatory side as well. This is not unique to India. The U.S. FAA faced similar criticism during the NOTAM failure, not because the rules were wrong, but because execution governance was weak.

A deeper cultural leadership pattern: Strategy over execution

Across many Indian institutions, there is a visible bias towards strategy and messaging, and less towards operational discipline and detail. Common patterns include thinking being elevated, doing being delegated, execution being undervalued, operational rigor not being celebrated, caring for people being expressed more symbolically than practically, and status being tied to “ideation”, not “implementation.” In such environments, narrative can outrun reality, and ambition can outrun resilience. Leadership visibility tends to be rewarded more than operational vigilance. When this mindset meets a complex, high-stakes sector like aviation, the consequences become visible quickly. The IndiGo disruption is not only about schedules and systems; it is a window into cultural leadership biases that shape our institutions.

A second duality: The ‘market-cap mindset’ vs the ‘operational mastery mindset’

There is also a deeper duality emerging in corporate India. In recent years, the narrative has tilted heavily toward market-cap driven ambition—scale, speed, dominance, and bold projections. These are celebrated and rewarded publicly. Analysts applaud them. Media headlines magnify them. Boards internalise them. This Market Cap Mindset often manifests as growth narratives and bold future roadmaps, big vision statements, aggressive scaling, market-share races, investor-call signalling, and playing to analysts, media, and public perception. But the quieter and more essential disciplines of running the core business with rigor fall into what we might call the Operational Mastery Mindset, which values quiet excellence in day-to-day operations, discipline in execution, the boring but critical processes that keep systems safe, operational buffers and shock absorbers, thoughtful risk management, continuous refinement and improvement, and the deep joy of running a resilient enterprise. Indian corporate culture increasingly rewards the former while deprioritising the latter. And when valuation narratives overshadow operational maturity, governance blind spots deepen. This recent disruption is a reminder that sustainable growth is not built on ambition alone, but on the unglamorous strength of the systems underneath.

The broader message: Strengthening governance capability in India

The IndiGo disruption is not just an airline story. It is a governance story. A regulatory story. A leadership story. A cultural story. It highlights the need for boards that challenge assumptions, not just endorse ambition; leaders who value execution excellence as much as strategic vision; regulators who ensure readiness, not just issue rules; institutions that operationalise care, not just express it; and cultures that celebrate resilience, not just scale. Ultimately, operational failures of this magnitude reveal care gaps: between what we say we care about, and what we invest in deeply enough to safeguard. For a nation aspiring to global leadership, strengthening this alignment between intention and execution is not optional. It is essential.

(The author is managing partner, Amrop India. Views are personal.)