The internal airways of India, Pakistan and Nepal are in ferment as infant carriers grapple for a toehold in a market that might just expand beyond all expectation.
The domestic airways of all major South Asian countries have been opened to some degree in the rush of liberalisation, and you would expect that big commercial houses would be into airlines by now. Not so. They are all playing safe, waiting for the smaller players who have jumped in to open up the market so that they can come on strong.
The story is the same in each country of South Asia: private operators are regarded as unwelcome pariahs by the civil aviation directorates and the entrenched state air corporations, but, given enough leeway, they end up proving that there is a market and that it can expand if airlines are run like businesses rather than bureaucracies.
The most dynamic private airlines are to be found in India, Nepal and Pakistan, in that order. Sri Lanka has a couple of small airlines, but they have been grounded for security reasons since September 1995, and the government is using some of their aircraft to maintain the air bridge to Jaffna peninsula. As for Bangladesh, there was a scramble for operating licences after the the government, in 1992, decided to allow small planes to fly in the private sector. However, there is only one private operator, Aero Bengal Airlines, which flies twice-weekly from Dhaka to Barisal on the coast.