Thales and IndiGo, India’s largest airline, have signed a strategic maintenance contract for the airline’s current fleet of 430 Airbus A320 aircraft and future order of over 800 A32X aircraft.

As part of this 11-year contract, Thales will provide IndiGo with expert repair services for avionics components, coupled with Thales’s ‘Avionics-By-The-Hour’ (ABTH) programme – a comprehensive spares management solution that ensures the availability of critical components to minimise aircraft downtime. This, together with Thales’s ‘Repair-By-The-Hour’ (RBTH), guarantees timely maintenance for avionics, allowing IndiGo to increase the availability of its fleet and expedite repairs.

Repairs will be managed notably at Thales’s new state-of-the-art avionics MRO facility in Gurugram, India, located near the Delhi airport, which is designed to handle the increasing demand for avionics support, featuring advanced technology to streamline repair processes and ensure high levels of fleet availability. Thales’s skilled technicians specialise in maintaining complex avionics systems with repairs that meet stringent safety and regulatory standards.

IndiGo has also extended a 5-year contract with AvioBook, a Thales company, for AvioBook Flight —the only Electronic Flight Bag solution currently authorised for paperless operations by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). In use across the entire IndiGo fleet for over a year, AvioBook Flight has already helped significantly reduce consumption of paper usage annually thereby advancing environmental sustainability goals and streamlining flight operations on over 2,000 flights every day.

“We are pleased to partner with Thales, a leading aerospace company trusted worldwide for its expertise in avionics support, to augment IndiGo’s maintenance and repairs capabilities. With IndiGo’s growing scale and fleet, this association aligns with our commitment to offer a hassle-free and safe flying experience to our customers, while ensuring operational excellence and reliability,” Parichay Datta, Senior Vice-President, Engineering, IndiGo.

“This strategic partnership with IndiGo underscores our commitment to delivering airline world-class avionics support and services. Our new MRO facility in India increases Thales’s ability to provide a swift, reliable service, backed by the power of our global organisation, to meet the evolving demands of the Indian aviation industry,” added Thomas Got, Vice President, Aviation Global Services, Thales.

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India is seeking cooperation of Suriname, the Netherlands and other countries for sending a “multinational nomination” of ‘Chhath Mahaparva’, an ancient festival for the 2026-27 cycle in pursuance of its inscription on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The Ministry of Culture on September 16 said it organised a meeting with senior “diplomatic representatives” of the UAE, Suriname, and the Netherlands to seek their cooperation for a “multinational nomination” of ‘Chhath Mahaparva’.

Hosted at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts a day earlier, the meeting was chaired by Union Culture Secretary Vivek Aggarwal and attended by officials from the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of External Affairs, Sangeet Natak Akademi, and IGNCA. The ancient festival, dedicated to the Sun God and ‘Chhathi Maiya’, is one of the oldest festivals of India, celebrated in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and across diaspora communities living in Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, the UAE, and the Netherlands, the ministry said.

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With 15 elements already inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, India is among the leading countries in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, it said.

Yoga, the Kumbh Mela and Kolkata’s Durga Puja festival find a place on the list. The proposed multinational nomination of ‘Chhath Mahaparva’ for the 2026-27 cycle is “another milestone” in India’s cultural diplomacy and commitment to safeguarding living traditions, the statement said.

The ministry said the representatives who attended the meeting, “welcomed the initiative”, acknowledging the festival’s importance among the Indian diaspora in their countries and “assured support” for the nomination.

Meanwhile, on September 12, Seven new properties, including Deccan Traps at Panchgani and Mahabaleshwar in Maharashtra, and Natural Heritage of Tirumala Hills in Andhra Pradesh, have been added to the Tentative List of UNESCO’s World Heritage for India, according to officials.

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The Permanent Delegation of India to UNESCO said the addition of these properties highlight India’s “commitment to the preservation and conversation of its rich cultural heritage”. In a post on X, India at UNESCO said.

“The Permanent Delegation of India to UNESCO is happy to announce that India’s 7 properties have been added to the Tentative List of UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention.” These seven properties under the natural category include Deccan Traps at Panchgani and Mahabaleshwar (Maharashtra); Geological Heritage of St Mary’s Island Cluster (Udupi, Kamataka); Meghalayan Age Caves (East Khasi Hills, Meghalaya); Naga Hill Ophiolite (Kiphire, Nagaland), the Permanent Delegation of India to UNESCO said in a statement. Other properties are Natural Heritage of Erra Matti Dibbalu (Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh); Natural Heritage of Tirumala Hills (Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh); and Natural heritage of Varkala (Kerala), it said.

With these, the number of Indian properties on the Tentative List are now 69 (49 under Cultural category, three under Mixed category and 17 under Natural category), the statement added.

“Addition to the Tentative List is a mandatory requirement before the inscription of any property on the World Heritage List. We thank the Archaeological Survey of India for its diligent work,” it said.