NEW DELHI: With flight disruptions persisting across airports nationwide, the Civil Aviation Ministry on Wednesday directed IndiGo to slash its daily operations by 10% to stabilise schedules and reduce cancellations. Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu said the step was necessary given the scale of inconvenience faced by passengers over the past week.

IndiGo operates an average of 2,300 flights a day, meaning about 230 services will be temporarily taken off its network.

Naidu said IndiGo CEO Pieter Elbers was summoned to the Ministry to explain the ongoing crisis. “He confirmed that 100% of refunds for flights affected till December 6 have been processed. A strict instruction was issued to expedite remaining refunds and baggage handovers,” the Minister said.

He added that several passengers had faced “severe inconvenience due to IndiGo’s internal mismanagement of crew rosters, flight schedules and inadequate communication.”

A second round of meetings was also held with the airline’s top management to review stabilisation measures and ensure the “earliest possible restoration of normalcy.”

Earlier in the day, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) had imposed a separate 5% cut on IndiGo’s approved winter schedule, particularly in high-frequency sectors. Together, the two directives effectively double the number of flights IndiGo must remove from its daily operations.

For the ongoing winter schedule, which began in October, the DGCA had cleared 15,014 weekly departures for IndiGo. The regulator noted that while the airline was approved to operate 403 aircraft monthly — up from 352 in the summer schedule — it ran only 339 aircraft in October and 344 in November.

The DGCA has also barred IndiGo from operating single-flight sectors and instructed the airline to submit a revised schedule by 5 pm on Wednesday.