One morning, while booking a flight from Mumbai to Bengaluru, something felt odd. Every reasonable option came from either IndiGo or Air India. Later that day, while recharging my phone, the choice again narrowed to two: Jio or Airtel. Ordering a book meant Amazon or Flipkart. Splitting a bill happened, predictably, via PhonePe or Google Pay.
Without announcement or alarm, India has entered the age of two—a phase where duopolies quietly shape everyday transactions. Whether we shop, pay, fly, or connect, much of our economic life increasingly flows through two dominant players. The shift has been so seamless that most of us barely notice it.
At first glance, duopolies seem reassuring. Two strong firms imply stability, reliability, and scale. For consumers, friction reduces. For policymakers, oversight appears simpler. For investors, it signals market maturity.
Economics, however, offers a sterner view. A duopoly sits precariously between competition and monopoly—“too few to compete vigorously, too many to collude openly” (Tirole, The Theory of Industrial Organization). In sectors with high entry barriers—telecom infrastructure, aircraft fleets, logistics networks, digital payments—duopolies are not accidental; they are almost inevitable.
India’s economy is now dotted with them.
India’s telecom price wars of the 2010s drove data costs to global lows, but the casualties were many. Smaller operators disappeared and Reliance Communications collapsed. What emerged were Jio and Airtel, now controlling over 80 percent of the mobile broadband market.
Initially, consumers benefited. Once the dust settled, tariffs began creeping up. With Vodafone Idea struggling and BSNL lagging technologically, competitive pressure eased. When Jio or Airtel revises prices, the other typically follows within days—classic parallel pricing in a duopoly.
The deeper concern is systemic fragility. When two networks underpin payments, logistics apps, banking OTPs, telemedicine, and governance systems, failures cascade nationally.
UPI is India’s most celebrated policy innovation—a public digital payments rail admired globally. But the apps riding on it tell another story. PhonePe and Google Pay process more than 80 percent of UPI transactions.
This dominance isn’t born of anti-competitive behaviour but of early-mover advantage, design, and scale. Still, it raises structural questions. Two private apps now wield immense influence over user data, merchant visibility, and ecosystem incentives. Regulators spotted this early, proposing a 30 percent market-share cap—a rule repeatedly deferred because enforcing it could destabilise a critical system.
UPI was built to democratise payments. Its success has produced a platform duopoly atop a public pipe—a tension India must manage carefully.
Online retail in India is effectively a two-horse race. Amazon and Flipkart together control more than two-thirds of the market. For customers, this brings fast delivery and easy returns. For sellers, it creates dependence on algorithms that decide visibility, pricing, and promotions.
The Competition Commission of India has flagged concerns around preferential sellers, exclusivity, and search bias. Consumers see variety, but it is curated by two gatekeepers.
India’s response is unusual. The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) doesn’t seek to break the duopoly but to redesign the market architecture—shifting power from platforms to protocols, and from proprietary algorithms to interoperability. It is a bold experiment, watched globally.
Few sectors reflect India’s age of two as sharply as food delivery. Swiggy and Zomato together control around 95 percent of the market. Built through logistics scale, burn-rate stamina, and relentless user acquisition, the duopoly works smoothly for customers: predictable delivery times, refined apps, and instant refunds.
But choice is wide, not diverse. The same cloud kitchens, promoted listings, and algorithm-driven menus appear everywhere. With fewer competitors, surge pricing and delivery charges have edged upwards. Price innovation has slowed even as convenience has peaked.
For restaurants, dependence on two platforms reduces bargaining power. Discovery is no longer organic; it is bought, boosted, and ranked. When demand is controlled by a duopoly, restaurants become suppliers rather than partners.
Recent IndiGo disruptions have highlighted aviation’s concentrated structure. With IndiGo holding roughly 65 percent of the domestic market, the sector oscillates between a duopoly and a near-monopoly. For years, this seemed beneficial: IndiGo delivered efficiency and reliability, while Air India, under Tata’s stewardship, began modernising its fleet and operations.
But stability is a double-edged sword. When one airline carries more than 60 percent of domestic passengers, an operational failure becomes a national event. The IndiGo meltdown—thousands of cancellations and delays—triggered fare caps, regulatory intervention, and public outrage. A private crisis became a public policy emergency.
In aviation duopolies, efficiency concentrates, but so does fragility.
They often:
India cannot avoid duopolies in high-infrastructure, network-driven sectors. But it can build guardrails that prevent them from becoming monopolistic or fragile. Duopolies are not villains; they are simply firms that scaled faster than the rest.
The real question is how the next act is written. If India can balance openness with scale, and innovation with concentration, it can show that power need not become absolute. The age of two need not be the age of limits—if it becomes the age of balance.
Ashita Aggarwal is a Professor of Marketing at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR).
Views are personal.
First Published: Feb 06, 2026, 12:22
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