InDepth | Rising Corporate Concentration Tests India’s Competition Watchdog

On August 4, a surprise admission came from the Indian government. In a meeting of the Ministry of Finance, a top bureaucrat flagged the “oligopolistic nature” of India’s aviation sector, pointing to the control of civil airlines and airports by a handful of corporate players.

The concern, raised time and again by travellers and analysts, had finally reached policymakers. The committee, comprising bureaucrats from finance and civil aviation ministries, NITI Aayog and Airports Authority of India, was discussing plans for the privatisation of 11 new airports across the country.

After Anuradha Thakur, secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, flagged the oligopoly issue, she asked what safeguards were being considered to limit concentration and over-leveraging. The civil aviation ministry proposed capping the number of airports that a single bidder can win under the new privatisation drive.

But given the current concentration in airport operations, the safeguard is expected to make little difference. Of the 16 airports currently being operated by private players, eight are managed by Adani Airport Holdings alone. GMR Airports manages six, while Fairfax India Holdings and Zurich Airport International manage one each. GMR and Adani together accounted for roughly 83% of the 261.37mn passengers handled in 2025–26.

But the concentration in airports is only half the picture. India’s domestic aviation market is dominated by IndiGo and Air India, which together account for around 90% of passengers. When IndiGo cancelled flights on a massive scale last December, the limited choice of carriers magnified the disruption for travellers, with fares shooting up amid the chaos.

The problem extends beyond aviation. From telecom and digital payments to cement and paints, several sectors are dominated by a handful of players. This raises a question: is the Competition Commission of India (CCI) doing enough to ensure that competition is preserved?

The watchdog’s mandate is to prevent practices that harm competition, including the abuse of dominant market positions. It reviews mergers and acquisitions (M&As) that could adversely affect competition, investigates alleged violations, orders businesses to cease anti-competitive conduct and imposes penalties.

In August this year, former finance minister P Chidambaram criticised the CCI and called out monopolies or oligopolies in sectors like telecom, petroleum, airports, ports, cement and steel. “The Competition Commission of India is toothless. Show me one takeover or one merger in recent years which the competition commission has stopped,” Chidambaram said at a media event.

The question became even more important after Elon Musk, the American billionaire, last month claimed that his satellite-internet firm Starlink was facing delays in launching its services because of so-called “oligarchs”, a claim the Indian government has called “baseless”.

The CCI has not blocked a merger since it began approving M&A deals in June 2011. About 1,402 merger cases have come before it for approval. It has cleared of 1,349 cases as of March 2026. Only in 33 of the cases did CCI ask for some modifications before giving approvals.

“Over a thousand cases have been referred to it, but fewer than 3% have seen substantive remedies imposed, less than 1% have moved to a phase 2 investigation and not one has been totally blocked,” says Raj Nair, chairman, Avalon Consulting.

From 2023 to 2025, competition regulators blocked 66 mergers in the US, six in the UK and one in the European Union.

“Has the CCI been capable of ensuring that when companies merge, enough competition remains in the market? That is the mandate of the regulator. There the regulator has fallen short,” says Avirup Bose, a former expert consultant to the CCI and professor of competition law and policy at Jindal Global Law School.

The CCI’s record in antitrust matters also raises questions. As of March 2026, the CCI had registered 1,366 antitrust matters and disposed of 1,215, leaving 133 pending. In at least 18 cases, either the Delhi High Court or the Bombay High Court quashed the regulator’s order. The CCI has imposed ₹20,379cr in penalties, but about ₹18,300cr was stayed or quashed by appellate courts, effectively negating impact of much of its action.

So why has CCI never blocked a merger despite some deals giving the acquirers massive market shares in key sectors? And why hasn’t it clamped down on players despite market concentration leading to massive disruptions or pricing problems?

A Friendly Regulator?

India’s modern anti-monopoly law, the Competition Act, 2002, came into force in January 2003, and the CCI was formally constituted in October that year. But a dispute over who should head the regulator delayed its operationalisation.

The regulator began functioning in earnest only in 2009. But corporations soon began resisting merger rules, arguing that approvals took too long and that the thresholds for requiring approval were too low. When the merger-control regime of CCI finally kicked in in 2011, the CCI attempted to address these concerns through a series of concessions. It exempted specified routine transactions from notification, clarified the rules for deals with limited links to India, allowed interconnected transactions to be covered by a single filing and simplified the default notification form.

Over time, the emphasis on making regulation business-friendly became more explicit. It was aimed at assuaging industry fears, as India Inc saw competition laws as another form of ‘licence raj’.

In 2019, the CCI introduced a ‘green channel’ to fast-track mergers considered unlikely to harm competition. Of the 1,349 merger cases disposed of by the CCI, 150 have been allowed under green channel scheme. The commission took other measures too to iron out creases in ease of doing business.

The regulator has applied a similar approach in dealing with merger cases where the combined entity would end up with a lion’s share of the market. In 33 such deals, the commission asked the companies to modify the terms of the transactions to prevent them from misusing their dominance. It didn’t block any of them.

In the 2023 Air India–Vistara merger, the CCI had expressed concern that the deal could give the Tata group’s airlines more than 50% market share in at least seven domestic markets, while making them the dominant carrier on at least four direct Singapore–India routes. The CCI approved the deal after the parties agreed to restrictions on capacity and flight frequency for four years.

In the 2024 Reliance–Disney merger, the combined entity was expected to hold more than 85% of India’s sports television market. The deal was approved after the companies committed not to bundle television advertising slots for Indian Premier League, International Cricket Council and Board of Control for Cricket in India cricket rights until their existing rights expired. They also agreed to sell seven television channels.

In both cases, experts had raised concerns about market concentration, but the CCI approved the deals subject to modifications. It is difficult to check whether these commitments were followed through by the companies.

“On mergers, negotiated modifications are global practice, but they work only with independent monitoring and published compliance reports. The test is outcomes. If a market is as concentrated after a settlement as before it, the tool is closing files, not opening markets,” says Neeha Nagpal, founding and managing partner at N & Company Legal.

And it’s not just the merger reviews where such issues have been flagged. Take the power conferred on the regulator under Section 19(1) of the Competition Act. It empowers the CCI to inquire, on its own initiative, into anti-competitive agreements or abuse of dominance. In recent years, the competition regulator has drastically reduced its use of this suo motu power.

Data shows that the CCI took up one suo motu case each year over the past three years, compared with an average of about three cases referred by central or state governments. When a group of Rajya Sabha members asked about this decline in July, CCI chairperson Ravneet Kaur told the committee that suo motu cases were more frequent during the initial years due to limited public awareness regarding competition law.

“But the commission felt that there is somewhat of a conflict in that they are establishing a case against a party and also adjudicating it. Therefore, they have now avoided taking up a matter suo motu unless nobody else is willing to come forward,” she told the Committee on Subordinate Legislation of the Rajya Sabha.

This echoed criticism levelled at the CCI by Lok Sabha members last year, calling out its “reactive post-mortem approach” in antitrust cases where the impact has already been felt.

“But ‘reactive’ is largely a design feature, not only an institutional failing,” says Nagpal. “The Competition Act is built for ex-post enforcement. The CCI acts on information, the director general [DG] investigates, and by the time an order is issued, the market may already have tipped.”

The CCI chairperson did not respond to Outlook Business’ questions.

Capacity and Delays

It doesn’t help that the commission’s work keeps getting disrupted by lack of manpower, especially at the top leadership level. Consider this: when CCI chairperson Ashok Kumar Gupta retired in 2022, the government did not fill the vacancy for nearly seven months. During this period, the regulator lacked a quorum. The Competition Act requires at least three members to be present for the commission to validly transact business and make official decisions.

The regulator once again finds itself in a similar position. On July 14, 2026, commission member Anil Agarwal resigned. In September, Deepak Anurag’s term came to an end. That left only Kaur and one other member, Sweta Kakkad, on the competition watchdog.

In this situation, the watchdog applies the so-called “doctrine of necessity” on an interim basis to clear merger deals and prevent regulatory gridlock, given the statutory deadline for approvals. However, the same approach could not be applied to antitrust cases. This delayed some high-profile investigations involving major technology firms such as Google and Apple.

The recent anti-trust order concerning Delhi hospitals shows the impact of such delays. The antitrust probe against a group of hospitals in Delhi was ordered in November 2015, and a supplementary investigation followed in August 2018. The original Commission members hearing the case retired, and revised reports were submitted only in September 2024.

“A 10-year investigation may result in a decision arriving after the underlying market circumstances have materially changed, reducing the practical impact of enforcement… Effective competition enforcement ultimately requires decisions that are both legally robust and sufficiently prompt to preserve competitive conditions,” says Suman Kumar Jha, founder and managing partner at Corp Legex, a law firm.

A prolonged investigation can undermine the CCI’s broader objective, particularly in markets where prices and competitive conditions can change significantly over time.

In this case, the CCI ultimately decided that the investigation had failed to establish that prices were both excessive relative to costs and unfair under the legal test for excessive pricing.

Manpower shortage isn’t limited to the regulator’s top brass. Since 2014–15, the CCI has yet to operate at its full sanctioned capacity. As per the latest data available, the CCI’s highest staffing level was 133 members during 2016–17 and 2018–19. The body’s total sanctioned strength is 195. As per a 2025 Lok Sabha report, about 42% of positions at the Commission remained vacant.

Missing Bite

Time and again, competition scholars have urged the government to give the Indian competition regulator powers similar to those of its European and American counterparts. The CCI cannot suspend or reopen an approved merger beyond the time limits set by law. The regulator’s ability to investigate a completed merger is subject to a one-year limit from the date the combination takes effect.

This limit contrasts with the powers of the US Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, which can challenge completed mergers. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act also imposes continuing obligations on major technology companies and requires them to report certain acquisitions.

But the CCI does not have equivalent powers. The government-appointed Committee on Digital Competition Law said in a report in 2024 that the current ex-post framework—under which regulators intervene after an event occurs—does not facilitate timely redressal of anti-competitive conduct by digital enterprises. It observed that the existing antitrust framework may not be effective in preventing markets from irreversibly tipping in favour of large digital enterprises.

This was one of several recommendations the committee made to the government.

It also recommended a bill that would allow the CCI to act before powerful technology companies harm competition, rather than intervening after the damage is done.

However, the bill has remained under review since its initial draft was published.

At a time when India is trying to attract foreign investment into the country, experts say the commission’s inaction can damage investor confidence and drive investors away from the domestic market.

Jahangir Aziz, co-head of macroeconomic research at JPMorgan, an investment bank, said recently that greater industry concentration can lead to lower investment. “If you look at industry concentration, the casualty is investment,” Aziz said in an interview.

It also raises the bar for companies trying to enter certain sectors. If an industry is controlled by a handful of companies with established brands, distribution, technology, capital and customer relationships, a potential entrant has to spend significantly more merely to reach the starting line.

“We have seen instances where the government has tried to encourage new entrants. It is not the government’s role to inject private capital…You cannot force people to enter an industry if there is no space for growth,” says Bose of Jindal Global Law School.

Airline disruptions, rising mobile tariffs and barriers to entry in sectors such as paints and cement offer a glimpse of how concentrated markets can affect competition.

The watchdog needs greater capacity, stronger follow-through on its decisions and the willingness to challenge dominant players. Without these changes, the CCI risks becoming a regulator that documents competition concerns rather than one that resolves them.