The Hidden Crisis Behind India’s Service Failures: A Culture of Chronic Under Resourcing

The airline disruptions have invited a flurry of surface level explanations; regulatory interventions, grounded aircraft, supply chain bottlenecks. But these are merely the sparks that lit a system already soaked in gasoline. The crisis in aviation is not an aviation crisis at all. It is a symptom of a deeper structural disorder that has been building for years across multiple industries.

While much has happened and regulators have assured return to normally, they have also been on back foot amending and partly revoking an order which they had introduced almost 24 months back providing for a time bound roll out in18-24 months.

Having observed the same patterns in manufacturing, IT services, customer operations, healthcare, engineering and EPC firms, retail networks, and even financial services, it is evident that the root cause is not operational complexity. It is a mindset problem, a management philosophy of reducing resources to the bare minimum and expecting people and systems to somehow carry the weight indefinitely.

When “Lean” Becomes Lethal

Corporate India has long celebrated efficiency, optimization, and “lean operations.” In theory, these principles eliminate waste. In practice, they have mutated into a strategy of aggressive under resourcing. Many organizations now run with:

• Department heads doing frontline jobs,
• Teams operating with barely 50–60% of required capacity,
• Critical functions chronically understaffed,
• and Employees doubling up in ways no productivity model ever intended.

What looks mathematically efficient in boardrooms often collapses under real world complexity. Spreadsheets do not carry fatigue. Dashboards do not absorb stress. People do.

And when people break, customers feel the consequences.

Minimum Staffing, Maximum Risk

Leadership teams often talk about manpower planning failures or slow hiring pipelines. But the uncomfortable truth is simpler: many businesses are not even attempting to staff optimally; they are staffing minimally.

The pressure to keep COGS and COSS as low as possible leads companies to operate at personnel levels that look efficient quarterly but are unsustainable annually. The result is a silent extraction economy, where profitability is boosted not through innovation but by stretching employees beyond reasonable limits.

Employees end up:

• Performing the work of two or three people, stretching shifts beyond limits.
• Compromising quality to meet impossible timelines,
• Burning out under relentless workloads,
• And ultimately being blamed for failures rooted in executive decisions.

Meanwhile, customers encounter long queues, delayed services, poorly informed staff, unmet commitments, and declining reliability.

In chasing margin, companies slowly erode the very trust that sustains long term profitability.

The Growth Paradox: High Demand, Low Accountability

India is a growth economy. Demand is rising faster than supply in aviation, healthcare, real estate, logistics, digital commerce, and essential services. When demand is guaranteed, the incentive to invest in service quality weakens. Companies believe customers have limited alternatives, and therefore reliability can slip without immediate consequence.

But this creates a dangerous complacency: as long as the consumer keeps coming back, the system does not feel compelled to reform.

However, growth without quality is a fragile foundation; especially for a nation with aspirations of becoming a developed economy by 2047. A world class economy cannot run on understaffed hospitals, overworked airline crews, exhausted IT teams, or overstretched infrastructure operators.

India’s Hidden Crisis Is a Workforce Crisis

Across sectors, the message is consistent: the system is running hot. Too hot.

Aviation crews working beyond safe limits. Customer service agents handling impossible volumes. Delivery personnel facing unsustainable targets. Engineers racing deadlines with no buffer. Healthcare workers navigate patient loads that compromise care.

These are not one-off lapses; they are the predictable outcomes of an economic model that treats manpower as a cost to be minimized, not a capability to be strengthened.

What Needs to Change

India does not need firefighting; it needs structural correction. Five shifts are essential:

1. Recalibrate manpower norms: Move from minimum staffing to sustainable staffing grounded in realistic workload assessments.
2. Institutionalize operational buffers: Build redundancy into critical functions, the same way financial reserves are built into balance sheets. None of the Workforce planning Models today accounts for leave breaks and wellness time off for employees, except for shift rostering and mandatory gaps.
3. Reset board level priorities: Service reliability and workforce capacity must be treated as strategic, not discretionary.
4. Modernize workforce planning: Replace outdated headcount ratios with dynamic models tied to demand cycles and service expectations. Use AI models that generate scenario planning
5. Recognize human capacity as an asset: Productivity gains come not from exhaustion, but from well-resourced teams with the psychological safety to deliver.

The Way Forward

India stands at an inflection point. Our economy is growing, our ambitions are rising, and our consumers are becoming more discerning. To sustain this trajectory, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: chronic under resourcing is not efficient, it is reckless. It weakens service quality, damages brand trust, and ultimately threatens the economic momentum we celebrate.

The airline crisis is simply the warning light on the dashboard. The real engine problem lies deeper. If India wants world class industries, it must start by building world class capacity, human, operational, and organizational. Efficiency is important, but resilience is indispensable.

Mohit Mathur is a senior HR Consultant with over two decades experience of helping organizations strengthen capability, governance, and workforce readiness. He writes on leadership, people strategy, and structural issues shaping India’s evolving economy.