The recent operational crisis at IndiGo, which left thousands of passengers stranded across Indian airports, was widely described as a failure of planning and governance. A safety regulation on pilot rest existed, the risks were known, yet preparedness was sacrificed in favour of efficiency and growth. When the system buckled, ordinary citizens paid the price.
What made the episode unsettling was not merely the flight cancellations. It was the recognition that the underlying mindset felt familiar. IndiGo’s lapse was not an aberration; it was a reflection of something deeper and more pervasive in Indian society.
The “IndiGo Moment” is no longer confined to corporate boardrooms. It is playing out daily in our homes, markets, workplaces, classrooms and digital lives.
When Self-Interest Becomes the Default Setting
At the heart of this ethical drift lies a simple but corrosive idea: my benefit first, consequences later. It governs countless everyday decisions. Traffic rules are ignored for personal convenience. Queues are broken with entitlement. Forms are filled with half-truths. Shortcuts are justified as “practicality” and dishonesty rebranded as “adjustment”.
Each act seems harmless in isolation. Collectively, they weaken the social contract.
The same logic that led a large airline to maintain razor-thin operational buffers is visible when a shopkeeper adulterates goods, a builder cuts safety corners or a professional manipulates invoices. The assumption is identical: the system will absorb the cost; someone else will pay.
Poison on Our Plates
Perhaps the most alarming manifestation of everyday ethical collapse lies in what we eat. Food adulteration has become routine rather than exceptional. Milk diluted with water or chemicals, spices mixed with synthetic dyes, vegetables treated with excessive pesticides and counterfeit dairy products are now recurring news rather than shocking revelations.
These are not distant corporate crimes alone. They often involve ordinary traders and suppliers embedded within the same communities they endanger. The motivation is margin protection. The justification is competition. The outcome is compromised public health.
What makes this especially troubling is silent acceptance. Consumers complain privately but often choose cheaper options knowingly, perpetuating the cycle. Ethics is surrendered for affordability — until the health costs surface years later, when accountability becomes impossible.
Medicines That Heal — or Harm
The betrayal deepens when it reaches the pharmacy. Counterfeit and substandard medicines continue to circulate widely, from common painkillers to life-saving drugs. These fakes may lack active ingredients or contain harmful substances, leading not only to treatment failure but sometimes death.
Here again, the ethical failure is deeply human, not abstract. It involves manufacturers who dilute standards, distributors who look away, chemists who stock fakes for higher margins and regulators stretched thin. Patients, desperate and price-sensitive, become collateral damage.
When medicine itself cannot be trusted, the foundations of civilised society begin to crack.
Classrooms Without Integrity
Equally disturbing is the erosion of ethics in education. Paper leaks, organised cheating rackets, proxy candidates, purchased degrees and manipulated evaluations have become frequent headlines. Merit is quietly replaced by manipulation, while integrity is mocked as naïveté.
When children learn early that rules are optional and success can be bought or arranged, society should not be surprised when the same mindset appears later in offices, hospitals, courts and corporate boardrooms. Ethical decay, once normalised in classrooms, rarely corrects itself in adulthood.
Digital Streets Without Moral Speed Breakers
Social media has accelerated ethical erosion at an unprecedented pace. Fake news, manipulated videos, communal rumours and unverified medical advice spread virally, often shared without malicious intent but with alarming carelessness.
The ethical question — is this true, is this harmful — is rarely asked before forwarding content. Validation, outrage and tribal loyalty override responsibility. Platforms profit from engagement. Users gain attention. Society absorbs the damage.
Truth becomes optional. Trust becomes collateral.
The Normalisation of Small Compromises
Ethical collapse rarely begins with spectacular scandals. It starts quietly, in everyday decisions that seem minor and justifiable. A vendor chooses cheaper ingredients. A manager delays hiring to protect margins. A citizen bends a rule “just once”. A family prioritises immediate private gain over wider public impact.
Each act appears harmless in isolation. Together, they weaken the social contract.
Over time, these compromises harden into habit. Habit turns into culture and culture into identity. Ethical erosion then stops being episodic and becomes structural. One quiet consequence of this fatigue is a growing hesitation across society to make long-term commitments — to institutions, relationships and future responsibilities. This is not simply about changing preferences; it reflects a deeper unease about stability, fairness and trust in the systems meant to support such commitments. When confidence in the collective weakens, people retreat into the immediate and the personal.
This is why corporate failures mirror societal behaviour. Institutions are not moral outliers; they are scaled-up versions of individual choices.
The Dark Side of ‘Jugaad’
India rightly celebrates jugaad — innovation under constraint. But its darker twin has gained ground: the normalisation of cutting corners. Outcomes are applauded without examining methods. Speed is admired without questioning safety. Compliance is treated as an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.
The line between ingenuity and irresponsibility has blurred dangerously.
The IndiGo crisis revealed what happens when efficiency is pursued without ethical resilience. The same principle applies to food, medicine, education, construction, digital platforms and governance.
Ethics Is Not Abstract — It Is Everyday
Ethics is often discussed as a lofty ideal or an institutional obligation. In reality, it is lived in mundane moments: choosing authenticity over a bargain, refusing to benefit from adulteration, verifying information before sharing, declining unfair advantage even when no one is watching.
Societies do not decay because of one scandal. They erode through millions of quiet ethical surrenders.
As Peter Drucker famously observed, “There is no such thing as business ethics. There is only ethics.” The same standard applies to corporations and citizens alike.
Reclaiming the Moral Commons
The solution cannot be outsourced entirely to regulators, courts or watchdogs. No authority can monitor every kitchen, pharmacy, classroom or WhatsApp group. Rebuilding ethics requires a personal audit.
The corporate mantra of “grow first, clean up later” has proven costly. Its personal equivalent — “my family first, society later” — is proving equally toxic.
The Lesson Beyond the Crisis
The IndiGo episode will eventually fade from headlines. Flights will normalise. Systems will adjust. But the deeper question will remain.
The skies may be vast but trust is fragile. And once a society loses it — in food, medicine, education, information or institutions — no amount of private gain can keep the collective system aloft.
The most urgent navigation India needs today is not only in the skies but in the moral compass of everyday life.
About the Author
Hridaya Mohan is a regular Columnist with a renowned Indian daily “The Hitavada” and some other newspapers / magazines internationally. Superannuated as Executive Director, Steel Authority of India Ltd. (SAIL), he is Senior Adviser, Metallon Holdings Pvt. Ltd. presently. He headed SAIL office at Beijing as Chief Representative (China & Mongolia) for six years. He has published and presented seventeen papers globally. Recipient of “Sir M Visvesvaraya Gold Medal”for one of his papers, “Benchmarking of Maintenance Practices in Steel Industry” from The Institution of Engineers (India), he was awarded with “Scroll of Honour” for the excellent contributions to Engineering fraternity from IE(I), Bhilai, “Jawahar Award” for leadership excellence in SAIL and “Supply Chain Leader – 2017” award from IIMM.Hridaya Mohan is a regular Columnist with a renowned Indian daily “The Hitavada” and some other newspapers / magazines internationally. Superannuated as Executive Director, Steel Authority of India Ltd. (SAIL), he is Senior Adviser, Metallon Holdings Pvt. Ltd. presently. He headed SAIL office at Beijing as Chief Representative (China & Mongolia) for six years. He has published and presented seventeen papers globally. Recipient of “Sir M Visvesvaraya Gold Medal”for one of his papers, “Benchmarking of Maintenance Practices in Steel Industry” from The Institution of Engineers (India), he was awarded with “Scroll of Honour” for the excellent contributions to Engineering fraternity from IE(I), Bhilai, “Jawahar Award” for leadership excellence in SAIL and “Supply Chain Leader – 2017” award from IIMM.
