A financially troubled airline is attracting business by offering low fares to fly Afghans to India for medical treatment.Loss making SpiceJet has cut routes, executives, pilot and aircraft numbers in a bid to survive. It has increased passenger numbers, but often by cutting fares to get volume. Whether the budget airline or new medical tourism route will survive is unknown.
There are hospitals in Afghanistan, but the quality is low compared to India. So it is attractive for Afghans to combine low cost flights with low cost treatment in New Delhi. Indian visas are easy to get and not so easy for the alternative of Pakistan, which is also seen as a less secure and less friendly place to go.
SpiceJet is the only private Indian carrier with direct flights to war-torn Afghanistan. India has made it easier to get visas and estimates that the number of Afghans seeking treatment, and in 2013 had 32,000 medical visas, set to increase substantially in 2014. SpiceJet flies 1000 Afghan medical tourists and their relatives each month from Kabul to New Delhi, and claims the route is very profitable. Since July, easier visa rules mean that Afghans can stay for as long as two years at a time and medical tourists with medical visas do not have to report to Indian police stations.
Few airlines will fly to Afghanistan but after more than 12 months of losses, with mounting costs and competition in India’s skies, the airline owned by billionaire Kalanithi Maran is taking risks to stay in business. Kam Air, an Afghan airline, also flies the two-hour, 1,005-km trip linking the Indian capital with Kabul in Afghanistan, where the US plans to withdraw almost all troops by the end of 2016 after its longest war. The only two other airlines with direct flights are state owned Air India and Kabul airline Safi Airways.
The Lajpat Nagar area of New Delhi is known as Little Afghanistan as it has travel agencies and restaurants owned by Afghans. This connection plus the very low prices in local hospitals where even those normally not attractive to medical tourists appear luxurious compared to hospitals in Afghanistan, helps drive demand.
The trip is not risk free. In July the Taliban attacked the airport in the Afghan capital with rockets while a SpiceJet plane was parked there. The airport is in the military zone and the rocket damaged three helicopters and a hangar. SpiceJet, briefly suspended flights to Afghanistan after the Kabul rocket attack, but soon went back to business.
One in five Afghans had a family member or close friend who died because of a lack of access to healthcare within the preceding 12 months, Doctors Without Borders said in a survey published in February. -
Source: www.imtj.com/news/?entryid82=447276#sthash.d8d9Q2R9.dpuf
