IndiGo’s collapse has shown just how hard it is for India to shed its legacy of passive governance

What unfolded was not just an airline management crisis—subsequent developments suggested that the company had strategically deployed industrial action against an air-safety regulation.

The incident points to a deeper malaise of what might be called passive governance: a state that waits for problems to manifest rather than anticipating and preventing them.

What is passive governance? It is not a lack of governance; it is a style of governance marked by delayed reaction and minimal proactive engagement. It often involves governments or regulators stepping in after a crisis unfolds, focusing more on managing the fallout than on detecting early warning signs.

This contrasts with active governance, where institutions continuously monitor, anticipate and adjust before a crisis erupts. Active governance relies on foresight systems—data, expertise and institutional coordination—to prevent problems or cushion their impact. Passive governance waits for problems to emerge or become visible enough to force a response.

In India, this style of governance has become an unmistakable pattern across sectors. Responses are robust after the fact, but the governing machinery seldom exhibits anticipatory capacity.

The IndiGo disruption offers a vivid illustration. The aviation sector is one of the most tightly regulated in India, under the watch of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and ministry of civil aviation. Yet, the system appeared blindsided by a staffing crisis.

Despite the regulator having notified its staffing rules two years ago, news reports indicate that IndiGo made no significant increase in its staff capacity even as it expanded flights and routes.

The regulator’s failure was not that the rules were irrationally framed, but that active monitoring was lacking. Airlines are required to maintain logs of daily flights and pilot assignments; the data from these logs should have been analysed to issue advanced warnings and follow up with regulatory action for non-compliance.

In addition to airline records, warning signals on inadequate staffing should also have been available from the statutory filings with the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation and Employee State Insurance Corp.

Social media has been rife with reports of difficult work conditions in aviation. An active governance approach would have picked up these signals through routine surveillance of data and reports, and used them to issue regulatory guidance.

When the crisis did occur, the initial government response was defensive and procedural. Statements were issued about “reviewing the situation” and ensuring “normal operations.” Only after days of disruption did the regulator respond, and that too by partially relaxing safety norms. By then, the economic and reputational costs had mounted—both for the airline and for India’s aviation reliability.

In addition to the immediate elements of this story, there is a more systemic failure: data and statutory reporting obligations are seen more as rent-seeking opportunities than as instruments for effective governance. This leads to a paradox where reporting obligations are viewed as intrusive burdens on market functioning, while regulators themselves blunder in wilful blindness.

This is compounded by the fact that many of our regulatory bodies are designed for compliance enforcement rather than risk anticipation. Their principal role is to ensure that entities comply with formal guidelines, not to scan data for emerging vulnerabilities. This approach is a bureaucratic legacy— regulation as policing rather than stewardship.

Ironically, this is happening at a time when the government, having adopted modern technology, is swimming in data. However, the data is held in silos and controlling departments and agencies view each other as competitors in a complex battle for status and budgetary allocations, rather than collaborators.

One reflection of this mindset is that statistical officers assigned to different departments are often assigned routine tasks, such as compiling HR reports and preparing parliamentary responses, rather than serving as frontline agents of information management. The state of governance is captured by a pithy observation in the British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister, where a senior civil servant remarks that government is not a team but a “loose confederation of warring tribes.”

Passive governance, unfortunately, is politically comfortable. Being reactive lets governments take visible action during crises—press conferences, fact-finding committees, emergency guidelines—that generates immediate public legitimacy. Proactive action, by contrast, is often invisible. Preventing a crisis does not produce headlines. It requires investment in data systems, institutional capacity and regulatory humility, which seldom capture the political imagination.

Thus, a cycle persists: crises recur, citizens adapt and the machinery consolidates its role as a reactive firefighter rather than a preventive architect. This dynamic helps explain why routine decisions are converted to firefighting measures. Civil servants take peculiar pride in how hard and late they work to handle predictable emergencies, rather than implementing systemic improvements that would prevent the crisis in the first place.

What is needed is a change in perspective. Governance must be treated not as an exercise in event management, but as continuous risk management. This requires using data for predictive monitoring, inter-agency coordination and the development of protocols for the active sharing of data across departments and agencies. The public release of operational metrics would allow civil society and experts to flag early risks.

These are not radical ideas; they exist in numerous commission reports. The problem is a lack of institutional intent. At the highest level, the government has shown a keenness to adopt ‘whole-of-government’ systems. I have previously discussed how mechanisms like Pragati were effective in resolving inter-agency problems. Unfortunately, these lessons have not been institutionalized.

The author is visiting professor at the Institute for Studies of Industrial Development and Institute for Human Development and former chief statistician of India.