New Delhi: In an attempt to make India the top air sports nation by 2030, Civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on Tuesday launched a national air sports policy (NASP 2022). During the launch, he said that India will emerge as a global hub for air sports, which will help the country generate up to 10,000 crores annual revenue and over 1 lakh jobs for youth.
The Union Minister further said that the country's air sports market has the potential to expand to a Rs 1,000-crore industry. The air sports business in India generates revenues of about Rs 80 crore to Rs 100 crore at the moment, added Scindia. While Speaking about the future trajectory, Scindia said that “From a small market size of around 5,000 odd air sports practitioners creating around Rs 80-100 crore of annual revenue in India, I feel we can target over Rs 8,000 – 10,000 crore annual revenue and generate over 1,00,000 direct jobs. The economic multiplier benefits in terms of travel, tourism, support services and local infrastructure development will be over three times."
The policy will cover air sports activities such as aerobatics, aeromodelling, paragliding, hand gliding, ballooning, drones, paramotoring, skydiving, etc. This comes after the ministry solicited public feedback on a draft of the National Air Sports Policy in January 2022. It has been our effort to see that Air Sports gets an enthusiastic beginning. Today we're releasing National Air Sports Policy 2022. This is after much research, consultation & on basis of great resolve, we've come forward to you with this new architecture," Scindia said.
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"Why this is important for India is the fact that we need to look at emerging sectors. And the air sports arena is one such area that has the ability to transform into a huge industry in India. The potential is prevalent for multifarious reasons," he added.
Speaking about how India's geographical diversity might aid the country's development into a major air sports hub, the Union Minister said "First of all, India has a huge geographic expanse that extends from the Himalayas and the mountainous regions to our states in the northeast to the plains in central India to the coastal regions on the western-eastern coastline, and therefore it has the potential to have the widest diversity of air sports."
Now combine that geographical advantage with the demographic dividend that India enjoys. 70 per cent of India's population is below the age of 35. That means we are talking about close to about 950 million people below the age of 35. Therefore, this is an industry that is ripe for the picking, but it lacked until today an architecture to be able to propel it forward," Scindia added.
The strategy according to Scindia will attract air sports enthusiasts not just from India but from abroad as well. "Also the fact that the winter period in Europe, North America, and Australia must also get alternative locations and that can be the go-to destination in the form of India for these air sports because of the harsh winter conditions in those continents all of those activities can move to India."
