December 22, 2025

-

Premium

IndiGoof

IT was the afternoon of December 4, and the Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru had lost all sense of order. The departure boa rds blinked, then froze. Airline counters stood deserted, as people wandered around dazed and confused. Hundreds of bags lay scattered across the terminal, unattended and unclaimed. It would have been an unsettling sight in any airport, let alone one of India's busiest. Fortytwoyear old animation designer Rituparna Sarkar stood amid the chaos, clutching a ticket she had booked weeks earlier. She was flying to Mumbai for an international anima tion festival she had organised herself, hoping to arrive a day early. Instead, she watched the airport dissolve into mayhem. "It was worse than a railway station," she says. "Luggage from every possible flight was just lying there. Nobody knew whose it was. Nobody was guarding any thing." Airline staff offered no answers. Sarkar remained stranded for 14 hours. She never boarded her flightTwo days earlier in Bhubaneswar, Sangama Das and Medha Ksheerasagar, both software engineers in their 20s, sat at the airport watching the clock count down to their wedding reception that night in Hubballi, Karnataka. Their IndiGo flight had been put on "delay" since morning till late at night, as relatives and some 700 guests waited in anticipation at the reception venue. Eventually, the airline announced their flight had been cancelled. The couple then found themselves attending their own reception remotely, via video conferenceIn the Northeast, Manjuri Palit, a school teacher in her 50s, was stranded at the Guwahati airport on December 5 with the embalmed remains of her husband stored in the cargo hold. She was taking him to Kolkata for burial. All the paperwork, from hospital clearances to permissions from local authorities, had been painstakingly prepared. But the morning flight refused to take off. Embalming lasts only 48 hours. Time was running outSarkar, Das, Ksheersagar and Palit, all had chosen to fly what was till recently perceived as India's most tru sted airline. After all, IndiGo had turned punctuality into a promise and then into a brand big enough to be billed "India's favourite". It had also become India's largest airline, cornering over 60 per cent market share for domestic flights. Before cri sis struck, it operated more than 400 aircraft, ran roughly 2,300 flights a day, flying to over 90 domestic and 45 international des tinations, carrying an average of half a million passengers daily. Ontime performance was not a metric for IndiGo; it was the product itself. For nearly two decades, it sold Indians something rare in domestic aviation: predictability, efficiency and reasonable fares. The airline even exhibited a sense of humour, its `6E' flight identifier an apt marker of its ubercool attitudeIn the first week of December, though, that brand image took a battering. All hell broke loose between December 4 and 6 when an

A MULTI-LANE MANAGEMENT EXPRESSWAY

EVERY YEAR, WHEN THE INDIA TODAY BEST B-SCHOOL SURVEY ARRIVES, it performs a small but essential act of national introspection. It asks: what does ambition look like in India today? Where does the country believe managerial talent should come from? And how far will the management-education establishment go to stay relevant in a world being reprogrammed by technology, geopolitics and shifting aspirations? This year's survey, conducted by market research agency MDRA, is the story of an industry that once prided itself on stability but now faces volatility. It's a story of students who once measured success in salary packages but now read value in flexibility, networks and lifelong relevanceAcross campuses, something fundamental is shifting. Where the Indian MBA was once a monolith--two years of classroom learning, heavy case-based pedagogy and an unyielding hierarchy of institutions--it is now a multi-lane ex- pressway offering divergent routes: full-time programmes for young graduates, online degrees for working professionals, advanced certificates for mid-career executives and doctoral pathways accessible even to senior industry specialists. Management education has moved to becoming a continuum, and India, with more than 4,000 B-schools and the world's youngest workforce, stands at the epicentre of this transformationA two-tier system consolidates If there is an organising principle to the 2025 B-school landscape, it is bifurcation. The sector has split into two distinct tracks: the elite orbit and the crowd below it. At the summit sit the storied giants--public institutions like the IIMs and the best private players like SPJIMR, XLRI, MDI Gurgaon, NMIMS and Symbiosis--whose reputations are now almost as global as they are national. They enjoy sustained recruiter confidence, stable salary outcomes and an alumni network that functions like a self-reinforcing economic systemThis year, the top 10 B-schools maintained an average domestic salary of just over Rs 29 lakh. That figure edged up only marginally, but its significance lies in its stability. Even in a world unsettled by AI-induced job transitions, global supplychain restructuring, and economic headwinds, India Inc.'s appetite for top-tier managerial talent remains remarkably firm.