The sachet was a packaging innovation and, to its credit, it was probably contemporaneous with developments on this front abroad. Air Deccan's was essentially a marketing (that too, price) innovation supplemented by novel tech elements like internet booking. But it lagged international moves of low cost carriers as such by at least a decade. Meanwhile, the Nano is a complex product innovation, basically mimicking Japanese car companies by at least two decades. For genuine low cost aviation to take root in India we may need a societal level innovation involving the elephantine and stone walling bureaucracies of defense, finance, and petroleum (with a collective vested interest in the railways) as well as those of a platoon of myopic state governments, all in conjunction with mercenary private airport developers and airline operators who believe in charging what the market can bear. What may be needed is the vision and dynamism of Japan circa 1950s when it targeted the Bullet Train as a spearhead of transportation development. A combination of that and the Nano is needed to usher in real low cost domestic aviation in sub-continental and increasingly prosperous India, perhaps in international competition with China's.