India has been witnessing a tremendous increase in its Coronavirus caseload. Amid such an alarming condition, reports today said that Civil Aviation is planning to reduce seating capacity of domestic flights to 60 per cent from the current 80 per cent to arrest the Coronavirus spread. If the reports are to be believed, top officials from DGCA and Aviation Ministry may hold a meeting in this regard next week.
Top officials from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, Airports Authority of India, and the Civil Aviation Ministry are likely to meet next week to come out with a decision, quoted an official source as saying.
“We are looking at both the safety angle and the financial fair play angle before making a decision on reducing capacity utilisation in domestic flights,” the source added.
The source asserted that passenger traffic has already fallen in the past few days owing to curfew and lockdown-like restrictions in various states of the country. The daily air passenger traffic has fallen from 300,000 in February to 200,000-mark, the report added.
Mean-while, India has been reporting record single-day spikes of Covid-19 cases and on Sunday there were 261,500 infections and 1501 related deaths, pushing the tally to 14,788,109 to become second only to the United States. The positivity rate has doubled in the last 12 days to 16.69 per cent and 10 states — Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan — reported 78.56 per cent of the new infections, the health ministry said. Chhattisgarh reported the highest weekly positivity rate at 30.38 per cent, followed by Goa at 24.24 per cent, Maharashtra at 24.17 per cent, Rajasthan at 23.33 per cent and Madhya Pradesh at 18.99 per cent, according to the ministry. “The national weekly positivity rate has increased from 3.05 per cent to 13.54 per cent in the last one month,” the health ministry said in a statement.
