The Indian government plans to develop 44 airports, including four major hub airports, under a hub-and-spoke model designed to give the country seamless international air connectivity. Civil Aviation Secretary Samir Kumar Sinha announced the plan on Tuesday, 28 July 2026, at a launch event in Amritsar, Punjab. The event marked the start of hub-and-spoke flights from Amritsar’s Sri Guru Ram Das Ji International Airport (ATQ), making it the second spoke airport in the network after Varanasi, Economic Times reported.
Air India (AI) operated the inaugural Amritsar service under its ‘Easy Connect’ brand, which lets passengers from smaller cities check in once and travel onward to international destinations through a hub airport. Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (DEL) is currently the network’s only functioning hub, while Ahmedabad is next in line to become a spoke airport. The scheme sits inside a wider 10-year target announced by Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu to build 100 airports and 200 heliports across India.
What The Four-hub, 40-spoke Plan Involves
Sinha said the government plans to establish four hub airports and 40 spoke airports as the backbone of the new network. Under the model, passengers boarding from Tier-II and Tier-III cities will be routed through a major hub, such as Delhi, for their onward international leg. This removes the need to repeat immigration and baggage checks at every stop along the journey.
Naidu framed the strategy in ambitious terms during a video message at the Amritsar event. Hub and spoke, he said, is “an aviation sovereignty and an opportunity model for India”, tying the network directly to the government’s long-term goal of turning the country into a global transit point rather than a market that feeds passengers to foreign carriers.
Air India Launches Easy Connect Flights from Amritsar’s Atq Airport
Air India’s Amritsar service gives passengers ‘Easy Connect’ access to 27 international destinations within roughly four hours of arrival at Delhi. The list spans the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Australia, West Asia, and Southeast Asia, according to Air India’s own statement reported by Daily Excelsior. Air India will operate two daily ‘Easy Connect’ flights from Amritsar under the new arrangement.
Amritsar’s Sri Guru Ram Das Ji International Airport currently runs direct flights to Dubai, Sharjah, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, London, and Birmingham. The airport handled 9.97 lakh international passengers last fiscal year, a 13.5 percent decline compared with the year before, a slide Air India’s hub-and-spoke connection is designed to help reverse by opening a far wider set of onward destinations than Amritsar’s direct network covers alone. Amritsar’s large Punjabi diaspora communities in Canada and Australia make the city a strong source of connecting traffic.
Air India said it expects to launch inbound international flights to Amritsar under the same model within the next two months. That inbound leg will let arriving passengers’ clear immigration and collect baggage at Amritsar itself, rather than at Delhi, their first port of entry today.
Varanasi Was the Model’s Testbed Before Amritsar Joined
The hub-and-spoke scheme did not begin in Amritsar. Civil Aviation Minister K Ram Mohan Naidu inaugurated the first such flight at Varanasi on 25 June 2026, connecting Lal Bahadur Shastri International Airport (VNS) to 17 international destinations through Delhi on flight AI1111. Air India chief executive Campbell Wilson named Amritsar, Vadodara, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Visakhapatnam as the next cities set to join the network.
The government has separately approved a roughly Rs 2,869 crore expansion of Varanasi’s airport, covering a runway extension, a new terminal, and multilevel parking, to be finished within 13 months. Beyond these six cities, Air India has said it will progressively connect Ahmedabad, Goa, Guwahati, Kochi, and Patna to its Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru hubs.
Why India Wants to Capture Long-haul Transit Traffic
The scale of the opportunity explains why the government is pushing the model so hard. Close to 25 million passengers travel long-haul to and from India each year, and of the roughly 20 million who connect through another airport, about 85 percent currently transit through overseas hubs such as Dubai, Doha, and Singapore rather than an Indian one. Routing more of that traffic through Delhi and future Indian hubs is central to the government’s stated ambition of making India a preferred aviation hub by 2030 and a global one by 2047.
Delhi’s own capacity is expanding to support that goal. The airport’s international capacity is set to rise from just over 20 million passengers annually to 32 million once a newly converted international pier at Terminal 3 becomes operational, with seamless airside transfers between Terminal 1 and Terminal 3 to follow within about a month.
How This Compares with Adani’s Plan for a New Airline
The hub-and-spoke push is unfolding alongside a separate, parallel story about India’s airline capacity. Billionaire Gautam Adani’s group is weighing whether to launch a new airline or buy a stake in an existing one, according to sources cited by Reuters. A source close to the matter said plainly that “it’s a difficult business, but Adani wants to consider it” in the national interest, pointing to safety scrutiny at Air India and a pilot-shortage crisis at IndiGo (6E) as the twin pressures behind the government’s private nudge toward conglomerates.
The two stories point in the same direction. A hub-and-spoke network only works if enough capacity exists to fill both the domestic spoke legs and the international connections at the hub, and IndiGo’s 65.4 percent domestic market share leaves little room for error if one carrier stumbles. A stronger fourth or fifth carrier, alongside more hub-and-spoke routes, would give India’s aviation system redundancy that today rests heavily on Air India and IndiGo alone.
Akasa Air and The Modified Udan Scheme Add Regional Reach
Regional carriers are also aligning with the government’s connectivity push. Akasa Air (QP) confirmed it will study routes under India’s revamped regional flying programme, the Modified UDAN Scheme, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched on 4 July 2026 with a budget of roughly Rs 28,840 crore over ten years. Akasa Air chief executive Vinay Dube said the airline would evaluate each sector on its own merits rather than commit to routes in a blanket rollout.
UDAN and the hub-and-spoke model target different but complementary problems. UDAN funds routes into smaller, currently unserved airports, while hub-and-spoke gives those same Tier-II and Tier-III passengers a smoother path onward once they reach a hub. Akasa Air’s fleet, which is set to grow from its current size to 226 Boeing 737 MAX jets by 2032, gives it capacity to expand into these smaller markets as UDAN routes are confirmed.
New Airports Like Noida and Maharashtra’s Palghar Will Feed the Network
A 44-airport hub-and-spoke system needs greenfield capacity to match, and two projects show that build-out already underway. Noida International Airport (DXN) opened for commercial operations on 15 June 2026 with five domestic routes, including a direct link to Amritsar, and is designed to reach 70 million passengers annually across four phases. Officials have positioned DXN as one of Asia’s largest airports by land area once fully built.
Maharashtra is pursuing a different approach to the same problem. The state government cleared a detailed feasibility review for India’s first offshore airport, near Kore Beach in Palghar district, designed to handle up to 90 million passengers and roughly three million metric tonnes of cargo a year at an estimated cost of $5.2 billion, Avio Space reported. Together with Delhi, Noida, and the existing Mumbai airports, these projects form the physical infrastructure the 44-airport hub-and-spoke network will eventually need to function at scale.
What Happens Next
The government has not published a fixed timeline for building out all 40 spoke airports, though officials have said six new hub-and-spoke destinations would follow within six weeks of the Varanasi launch. Air India has not confirmed an exact date for Amritsar’s inbound international service, and the airline has said further cities will join the network on a progressive basis rather than all at once.
For now, the clearest signal of intent is what is already flying. Two spoke airports operate today, Delhi remains the network’s only functioning hub, and a government that once talked about airport expansion in the abstract is now naming specific routes, specific flight numbers, and specific dates. Whether the remaining 42 airports arrive on schedule will determine if India’s hub-and-spoke ambitions match the scale of the announcement made in Amritsar this week.