Open Skies Over Eurasia: Subhash Goyal Says India and Russia Could Unlock a 50 to 100 Percent Boom

Some ideas arrive as a whisper. Others land like a widebody jet touching down on a freshly cleared runway, engines roaring, doors swinging open, and a whole terminal suddenly looking up. The proposal from Subhash Goyal belongs firmly in the second category.

The Chairman of the Aviation and Tourism Expert Committee at the Indian Chamber of Commerce, and the Chairman of STIC Travels, has called for an open sky policy between India and Russia. His claim is bold and easy to remember. Within two years, tourism and trade between the two countries could rise by 50 to 100 percent. Not five percent. Not a gentle nudge. A doubling of movement, money, and people.

It is the sort of headline that makes airline boardrooms sit up, travel agents reach for their calculators, and exporters start sketching new routes on the back of a napkin. Yet behind the optimism sits a deeper story about two nations that have shared decades of friendship and still fly to each other on a surprisingly thin web of connections. Goyal has not simply floated an idea. He has pointed at a locked door and asked a very practical question. Why is this door still locked?

What Subhash Goyal Actually Said

An open sky policy is not a slogan. In aviation language it means that airlines from two countries can operate as many flights as the market will support, to as many points as they wish, without tight limits on seats, frequencies, or the number of carriers allowed on a route. Today, most international flying is governed by bilateral agreements negotiated government to government, where each side trades capacity like rare coins and protects its flag carrier with careful arithmetic.

Goyal wants that arithmetic loosened between India and Russia. His argument is refreshingly simple. If more planes can fly, more people will travel. If more people travel, more business follows. If more business follows, trade grows. And because the current base of traffic is modest, even a moderate injection of capacity could produce a dramatic percentage jump.

He is not asking for a favour. He is asking for a fair chance, and for the paperwork to stop being the bottleneck that it has quietly become.

Why Open Skies Matter More Than Most Travellers Realise

Passengers rarely think about bilateral agreements. They think about fares. They think about whether they can find a seat in December, whether the connection is bearable, whether the journey home is short enough to justify a weekend. What they never see is the invisible hand of capacity limits shaping every one of those answers.

When seat caps are tight, fares stay high and flights stay full. Airlines cannot add aircraft to a route simply because demand is healthy. They must wait for a negotiation, and negotiations move at the speed of diplomacy rather than the speed of commerce. The result is a market that looks calm on the surface and is quietly starved underneath. For India and Russia, where demand is growing faster than the flying programme, that starvation is expensive.

The Numbers Behind the Ambition

A 50 to 100 percent increase sounds dramatic, and it would be dramatic. But it becomes easier to believe when you look at the starting point. Moscow remains the dominant gateway, while cities such as St Petersburg, Kazan, Sochi, and Yekaterinburg are barely touched by direct Indian services. On the Indian side, Delhi and Mumbai carry most of the load, with enormous untapped potential across Goa, Kerala, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, and Chennai.

Route maps tell the story better than any forecast. Two large markets, hundreds of millions of combined consumers, and only a handful of efficient direct links between them. When you are starting from a narrow base, doubling is not a miracle. It is arithmetic plus aeroplanes.

A Tourism Story Waiting to Be Told

For Indian travellers, Russia has always promised something cinematic. Red Square dusted with snow. The onion domes of St Basil’s catching the light. The Hermitage galleries in St Petersburg, where a single afternoon feels like a walk through a dozen civilisations. The Trans Siberian railway, still one of the great journeys on the planet. Yet for years these experiences sat behind a visa process, a long flight, and a price tag that made them feel harder than they needed to be.

For Russian travellers, India offers a different kind of dream. The beaches of Goa, where the season stretches like a long exhale. The backwaters of Kerala. The Golden Triangle of Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur, where history sits within a comfortable drive of a good hotel. Ayurveda retreats, Himalayan trails, and wedding photography schedules that now routinely include a South Asian backdrop. Every agent in the business knows the appetite exists. The missing ingredient has been seat capacity and simplicity.

Tourism thrives on friction reduction. Make a journey easier by ten percent and you do not gain ten percent of visitors. You gain the travellers who had been sitting on the fence for years. Goyal’s two year horizon is not naive. It is an acknowledgement of how much latent demand is waiting for a green light.

Trade Travels in the Cabin Too

Tourism is the visible half of the story. Trade is the quiet half, and it moves in the same cabin. The people who sign contracts are people who need flights. Pharmaceuticals and engineering goods, tea and textiles, chemicals and fertilisers, energy equipment, gems and jewellery, agri products and education. Every category depends on a buyer and a seller who can meet face to face, and no video call has ever replaced a handshake in a factory in Nizhny Novgorod or a warehouse in Surat.

Cargo capacity matters as well. Passenger aircraft carry belly cargo, which is why every new route becomes a small logistics corridor for high value shipments. When flight numbers rise, freight options rise with them, and exporters gain the thing they value most. Predictability.

What Stands in the Way

None of this is frictionless. Aviation between India and Russia involves a genuinely complicated middle ground. Insurance and reinsurance coverage for aircraft and routes requires careful structuring. Payment settlement mechanisms need to be reliable so that ticket sales and cargo invoices clear without drama. Aircraft leasing and maintenance support must be navigated with attention to regulatory positions on both sides. Airlines carry their own caution about secondary sanctions risk, and no honest analyst would pretend otherwise.

Add the operational layer. Airport slots at peak hours. Ground handling bandwidth. Safety oversight and continued airworthiness checks. Consistency of service standards. Language support for crew and ground staff. Destination infrastructure and hotel capacity in secondary cities. Marketing budgets that convince a traveller the journey is worth making this year rather than someday.

These are not reasons to do nothing. They are reasons to negotiate carefully, and to build the institutional plumbing before turning on the tap.

A Two Year Road Map That Actually Makes Sense

Goyal’s timeline gains credibility when you break it into phases. In the first phase, both sides could expand entitlements on the existing trunk route between Delhi and Moscow, allowing additional frequencies and a second carrier on each side. In the second phase, scheduled services could extend to Mumbai and to a southern gateway, opening access to different catchment areas and different seasons.

In the third phase, charter programmes could be encouraged toward Goa, Kerala, and the leisure corridors where demand is seasonal and price sensitive. Charters are nimble. They test markets without committing a full year of capacity. In the fourth phase, codeshare and interline arrangements could multiply connectivity so a single ticket carries a passenger from Kochi to Kazan or from Novosibirsk to Coimbatore with a smooth connection and a single baggage tag.

Alongside the flying programme, tourism boards, chambers of commerce, and travel trade bodies can run joint campaigns, simplify documentation, and build curated itineraries around culture, wellness, education, weddings, and business events. Students and medical travellers deserve special attention. They are high loyalty segments who return, refer, and build the human bridges that outlast any tariff negotiation.

Why This Matters Beyond the Bilateral Relationship

India is not just buying seats. It is building a hub. Every additional long distance route increases Delhi’s credibility as a transfer point between Southeast Asia, the Gulf, Europe, and the wider Eurasian landmass. The International North South Transport Corridor is reshaping how goods move across the region, and aviation is the fast lane that shares the same ambition.

An open sky arrangement with Russia would also signal something larger to the global aviation community. It would show that India is willing to liberalise where the market justifies it, and that capacity decisions can be driven by passengers rather than by protection.

The Human Side of an Open Sky

Strip away the policy language and what remains is simple. A student from Kerala who wants to reach a university in Moscow without three connections and a night in an airport lounge. A honeymoon couple from Pune dreaming of a white winter in St Petersburg. A small exporter in Ludhiana who needs to visit a buyer twice a year and currently spends more on connections than on the meeting. A grandmother in Russia who wants to see a grandchild growing up in Bengaluru. A film crew, a chess team, a trade delegation, a wellness traveller, a historian.

Aviation is not a spreadsheet. It is the architecture of who gets to meet whom, and how easily, and at what cost. That is why Goyal’s numbers matter less than his direction. The open sky argument is really an argument about access.

Final Thoughts

Subhash Goyal has done what few industry voices manage. He has taken a technical negotiation and reframed it as an opportunity that ordinary travellers and ordinary businesses can picture in their own lives. A 50 to 100 percent increase in tourism and trade within two years is an ambitious target, and it should be treated as a target rather than a guarantee. But ambition is exactly what a thin route map needs.

The door is not locked because the market is small. The market is small partly because the door is locked. Open skies do not guarantee success, and they do not erase complexity. What they do is remove one stubborn barrier so that airlines, agents, exporters, and travellers can prove what the market is genuinely worth.

Two countries with decades of shared history deserve more than a handful of flights and a hopeful waitlist. They deserve a runway. Goyal has pointed at it. The next move belongs to the negotiators, and to the airline planners who will decide how soon a family in Coimbatore can watch snow fall on Red Square.