The decision to ban regular scheduled flights is done by DGCA for the expressed reason of reducing Covid transmissions inbound by limiting capacity although I suspect they are under pressure to keep extending it not by health officials but by the Babus working the bubble rules with each country.

How does allowing Indian nationals to transit through UK if the flights are AA ticked under codeshare but not if the same exact flights are BA ticketed make a difference to Covid exposure? In fact, none of the outbound restrictions make any sense from a Covid perspective.

By making only end-end bubble arrangements and only with flagged carriers of the two, they remove all competition from the hub and spoke model of third country airlines to drive half or more of the traffic to direct AI flights. They also seem to be using the bubble arrangements to extort more landing slots from countries who are eager to fly to India.

People who are old enough might remember the times when all countries did exactly this to protect their national carriers and that was the norm. It is very appealing to Govts to go back to that scheme with a valid excuse. May be they want to work off the AI debt they have assumed this way as part of their deal with Tata. In which case we may have to endure this for a long time….

Enforcement seems to be airline specific. BA seems to be a stickler for this while Emirates and LH have been ignoring this.