More than half the flight routes launched under India’s regional aviation scheme never survived. The March 2026 UDAN 2.0 cabinet approval puts ₹28,840 crore in infrastructure spending behind a second attempt.
Modified UDAN — the formal name after this week’s cabinet nod — cleared on March 25, chaired by PM Modi. The plan runs 10 years, from FY 2026-27 to FY 2035-36. The targets: 100 new airports from existing unserved airstrips, 200 helipads for hilly and remote regions, and 120 new destinations.
Impressive numbers. UDAN 1.0 had impressive numbers too.
What the First UDAN Left Behind
Since 2016, the original scheme operationalised 663 routes and 95 airports — a remarkable infrastructure rollout by some counts. But only 45.6% of routes stayed alive. Airlines abandoned one in five routes once their three-year subsidy ended. Fourteen airports went dark.
The pattern was ruthlessly predictable: government builds airport, subsidises flights for three years, airline exits, airport sits empty. Three years of viability gap funding wasn’t enough to build real demand on thin routes. No maintenance money meant airports decayed. Route selection followed political maps, not passenger data.
That’s the track record backing the modified UDAN scheme’s ask for nearly ₹29,000 crore in new investment.
Three Fixes That Might Actually Matter
Longer money. Viability gap funding now runs 10 years — triple the original window. The ₹10,043 crore VGF pool gives airlines actual time to build demand instead of a sprint-and-exit incentive.
Maintenance support. For the first time, ₹2,577 crore goes toward airport operations and maintenance — up to ₹3.06 crore per airport annually for three years. This directly targets the “build and abandon” cycle.
Upgrade, don’t build. Instead of greenfield airports, UDAN 2.0 converts existing airstrips nobody’s using. Lower cost, faster activation, less wasted concrete.
The scheme also puts ₹3,661 crore toward 200 helipads in the Northeast, island territories, and hilly terrain — regions where roads literally cannot reach, unlocking genuine rural connectivity. Two HAL Dhruv helicopters and two Dornier aircraft add an Atmanirbhar component.
India doesn’t have an airport-building problem — it built 95 in a decade. It has an airport-sustaining problem. The March 2026 UDAN 2.0 cabinet approval will be judged by one metric: whether airlines are still flying these routes in year four, the exact point where version one collapsed.