There is almost nothing in common between India's largest airline and an obscure private university. Yet both managed to bind themselves together through their impact on national reputation — one by grounding a million passengers, the other by embarrassing the nation in front of the very world it had invited over.
If you happened to be a foreign tourist exploring India's diverse landscape in the first fortnight of December 2025, you likely went home convinced you had wandered into a madhouse. Airports across the country descended into scenes of chaos, uncertainty, human misery, and administrative failure on a staggering scale.
IndiGo — India's largest airline, commanding 65 percent of the market — had simply forgotten to hire pilots. Over the preceding fifteen to eighteen months, as safety regulations were revised, the airline failed to staff up accordingly. The result was the mass grounding of aircraft with no crew available to operate them. Nearly one million passengers had their flights cancelled; another 600,000 faced severe delays. The fiasco dragged on for days.
December is one of India's peak months for international tourism, with over a million foreign visitors arriving in a typical year. A significant number of those visitors must have returned home carrying an unflattering portrait of the country. Even those who escaped the airport mayhem would have watched the spectacle unfold on television or read about it in newspapers, where it dominated coverage for days.
A private company's operational failure had bloomed into a national crisis. It passed. And exactly two months later, another arrived — quieter in appearance, but more corrosive in effect.
This second embarrassment did not produce visual chaos or physical suffering. Instead, it launched a frontal assault on India's strategic positioning, its carefully cultivated goodwill, and its image in the world. India had organised one of the biggest global AI summits ever held in the Global South — a first for the developing world — assembling a dizzying array of dignitaries from politics, technology, and business. Heads of state, ministerial delegations, business leaders, AI thinkers, technology executives, and above all global media: New Delhi had them all.
The summit's agenda was nothing short of ambitious. People-first AI, democratisation, inclusion, safety, innovation — India wanted to signal to the world that even if it had missed the early bus on AI development, it would set the agenda for implementation. We may not have shaped the seeding of the field, but we certainly want a major say in the quality of the harvest.
So much for noble intentions.
Just before the main event, a private university in northern India decided to use the occasion for some opportunistic marketing ahead of the upcoming admissions season. The institution assembled students and faculty around a pair of imported gadgets — a Chinese robo-dog and a Korean soccer drone — and got hold of a reporter from the national broadcaster to witness what they presented as homegrown innovation. The university, they claimed, had developed both devices in-house, a testament to its world-class research capabilities and its huge investment in artificial intelligence.
This kind of lie is routine in India's private university ecosystem, and it might have slipped by unnoticed. But the Chinese robo-dog had other ideas.
A cabinet minister, caught up in the summit's atmosphere of technological optimism, posted a photograph of the robot with a caption celebrating India's progress in AI. To be fair, he did not explicitly attribute the device to the university. But as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. The public moved quickly. The Chinese manufacturer was identified; the product was found to be commercially available online.
First social media, then Chinese state media, rubbed the facts in India's face. At its own summit — one it had conceived, curated, and convened — India had been exposed as an impersonator. It is like being reduced to a makeup artist at one's own wedding.
It is telling that the equally dishonest claim about the Korean soccer drone attracted far less outrage. The fury was reserved for the Chinese product, which says something about where Indian public attention is trained. But regardless of the selective indignation, the damage was comprehensive: a national broadcaster that amplified the lie, a minister who inadvertently endorsed it, a publicity-hungry university that originated it, and a large exhibition booth that, by the end, stood dark and deserted as a symbol of the whole affair. Together, they projected an image of a country still not quite ready for the high table — and they did so in front of the very world India had invited to witness its readiness. Worse, it overshadowed the genuine achievements of the event.
You might wonder why I keep returning to the embarrassment in front of foreigners. What about us Indians? The short answer is that we are used to it. Domestic embarrassment barely registers anymore. The more important question is how two private entities — one a market leader in its industry, the other barely a footnote even within its own — managed to inflict such damage on national goodwill and derail undertakings of the highest order.
The answer lies in the quiet spread of negligence through multiple layers of governance, and a deepening apathy within government at multiple levels. India's intentions, in both these cases, were not in question. The airline regulatory framework existed; the summit's vision was genuine. What failed, in each instance, was execution — and in the second case, the most elementary due diligence.
India expects better. India deserves better. Ambition without institutional rigour is not a strategy. It is a stage set waiting to collapse.
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Vikas Gupta is a disabled entrepreneur representing himself in a landmark writ petition before the Delhi High Court
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