IndiGo plans to launch direct flights between New Delhi and Shanghai soon to become the third airline to operate flights between the two cities after India and China resumed air services last year after a gap of about five years.If approved, it will become the third direct air link between the two economies, China’s state-run Global Times reported on Friday.The airline plans to launch the route in late March or early April pending regulatory approval, it quoted officials as saying.On February 1, Air India launched the Shanghai-Delhi direct flight, resuming its flight services between the two cities after a gap of about six years.Chinese airline China Eastern resumed flight operations from Shanghai to Delhi in November last year. Officials say plans are afoot to launch direct Delhi-Beijing flight.Earlier IndiGo resumed the Kolkata-Guangzhou service on October 26, 2025, becoming the first Indian airline to restart direct flights to China after a five-year hiatus.Currently, there are two daily round-trip flights between Guangzhou and India. As of February 5, the Kolkata route has completed 102 flights, while the Delhi route has operated 87 flights, transporting approximately 54,000 passengers, officials told the daily.The average seat occupancy rate in 2025 was approximately 85 per cent, with the passenger base mainly consisting of business travellers, they said.Guangzhou and Shanghai hosts a large expat Indian business community       Pieter Elbers, CEO of IndiGo, in his earlier interview to Global Times expressed his confidence over the size of the air travel market between India and China as “one-third of the world’s population is living in these two countries”.China is the second-largest economy in the world, and India is the fourth, so “there is room for a lot of flights and a lot of operators”, he said.He also said that the airline is evaluating operations from additional Indian cities to more Chinese destinations.The route expansion came amid the background of warmer ties between the two countries in recent months.The flight services between the two countries were suspended following the Covid pandemic in 2020. They were not restored in view of the over-four-year border face-off in eastern Ladakh, which ended in October last year.The process of normalisation of India, China relations followed two summits between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping at Kazan in Russia in 2024 followed by a second meeting on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Tianjin last year.Besides flights, India and China have initiated a series of measures to normalise their relations.In July, India resumed granting tourist visas for Chinese nationals. Issuance of visas to Chinese nationals were suspended following the start of military stand-off along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh that began in May 2020.The two countries also initiated several people-centric steps to reset their ties which included resumption of Kailash Manasarovar Yatra, direct flights and visa facilitation.