New Delhi: India’s low-cost carrier Indigo has decided to lay off 10% of its workforce due to the crisis caused by coronavirus pandemic. With the coronavirus pandemic cutting the tourism industry to size, air carrier IndiGo has announced it will be laying off over 2300 employees.
Ronojoy Dutta, CEO, IndiGo said, “The current pandemic has impacted many industries around the world, amongst which aviation has been one of the sectors that has been impacted the hardest. Even now, IndiGo is flying only a small percentage of its full fleet of 250 airplanes.”
He said, “Right at the start of this crisis, IndiGo understood the gravity of the situation. For us, it was critical to minimise the impact of the pandemic on our employees and in fact IndiGo was one of the few airlines globally which paid full salaries for the month of March and April 2020, despite the disruption in
business. Subsequently, we did have to undertake a number of measures such as Pay Cuts, Leave Without Pay and various other costs; but unfortunately, these cost savings are clearly not enough to offset the decline in revenues. And from where things stand currently, it is impossible for our company to fly through this economic storm without making some sacrifices, in order to sustain our business operations.”
He further said, “Therefore, after carefully assessing and reviewing all possible scenarios, it is clear that we will need to bid a painful adieu to 10 per cent of our workforce. It is for the first time in the history of IndiGo that we have undertaken such a painful measure. This is indeed a very unfortunate turn of events from the optimistic growth trajectory we had carved out for ourselves just six months ago; but this pandemic has forced us to re-evaluate our best laid plans.”
The aviation sector has been one of the worst-affected sectors across the world. To help the impacted employees’ tide over the uncertainties emanating from this decision, IndiGo has created a ‘6E Care package’.