Last fortnight I was in Bengaluru, where we, along with hundreds of other passengers, witnessed IndiGo shuffling flight schedules like a deck of cards. Travelers across the country experienced delays of up to 12 hours. The airline, which controls more than 60% of India’s aviation market, collapsed. 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 government: a state that waits for problems to manifest rather than anticipating and preventing them. What is passive management? It’s not a lack of management; it is a management style characterized by delayed response and minimal proactive involvement. This 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 management, where institutions constantly monitor, anticipate and adapt before a crisis erupts. Active management relies on foresight systems—data, expertise, and institutional coordination—to prevent problems or mitigate their impact. Passive management waits for problems to emerge or become visible enough to force a response. In India, this style of management has become an unmistakable pattern across sectors. Reactions are robust after the fact, but the control machinery rarely exhibits anticipatory capacity. The IndiGo disruption provides a vivid illustration. The aviation sector is one of the most tightly regulated in India, overseen by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the Ministry of Civil Aviation. Yet the system seemed blindsided by a staffing crisis. Despite the regulator notifying its staffing rules two years ago, news reports suggest that IndiGo has not made any significant increase in its staffing capacity even as it expanded flights and routes. The regulator’s failure was not that the rules were irrationally constructed, 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 analyzed to issue advanced warnings and follow up with regulatory action for non-compliance. In addition to airline records, warning signals about inadequate staffing should also have been available from the statutory filing with the Employees’ Provident Fund Organization and Employees’ State Insurance Corporation. Social media is full of reports of difficult working conditions in aviation. An active management approach would have picked up these signals through routine monitoring of data and reports, and used them to issue regulatory guidance. When the crisis did occur, the initial response of the government was defensive and procedural. Statements were issued about “reviewing the situation” and ensuring “normal operations”. Only after days of disruption did the regulator react, and that too by partially relaxing safety norms. By then, the economic and reputational costs had risen – 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 tools for effective management. This leads to a paradox where reporting obligations are seen as intrusive burdens on market functioning, while regulators themselves languish in willful blindness. This is compounded by the fact that many of our regulatory bodies are designed for compliance enforcement rather than risk anticipation. Their main 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, which has adopted modern technology, is swimming in data. However, the data is kept in silos and controlling departments and agencies view each other as competitors in a complex battle for status and budget allocations, rather than collaborators. One reflection of this mindset is that statistical officers assigned to different departments are often tasked with routine tasks, such as drafting HR reports and preparing parliamentary responses, rather than serving as frontline agents of information management. The state of government is captured by a pithy observation in the British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister, where a senior civil servant observes that the government is not a team but a “loose confederation of warring clans.” Passive government is unfortunately politically comfortable. Being reactive allows governments to take visible action during crises—press conferences, fact-finding committees, emergency directives—that generate immediate public legitimacy. Proactive action, on the other hand, is often invisible. Averting a crisis does not make headlines. This requires investment in data systems, institutional capacity and regulatory humility, which rarely captures the political imagination. Thus, a cycle continues: crises repeat, 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. Government officials take particular pride in how hard and slow they work to deal with predictable emergencies, rather than implementing systemic improvements that would have prevented the crisis in the first place. What is needed is a change in perspective. Management should not be treated as an exercise in event management, but as ongoing risk management. This requires the use of 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 will enable 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 an eagerness to adopt ‘whole-of-government’ systems. I have previously discussed how mechanisms like Pragati have been effective in solving inter-agency problems. Unfortunately, these lessons are not institutionalized. The author is visiting professor at the Institute of Industrial Development Studies and Institute of Human Development and former Chief Statistician of India.
