Airports struggle to handle flyers way beyond their sanctioned capacity

While the government is pushing air travel in small cities and towns under Udan, the Regional Connectivity Scheme, many airports in the country are operating in excess of their capacity.

NEW DELHI: While the government is pushing air travel in small cities and towns under Udan, the Regional Connectivity Scheme, many airports in the country are operating in excess of their capacity. Some of these are even located in state capitals and tourist hotspots such as Jaipur, Leh and Port Blair.
According to data from the Union Ministry of Civil Aviation for 2016-17, 13 airports—those in Rajkot, Nagpur, Patna, Leh, Dehradun, Bagdogra, Jammu, Port Blair, Imphal, Agartala, Guwahati, Jaipur and Coimbatore— are handling far more passengers than they were designed for.

Some even deal with three or four times their actual terminal capacity, leading to bottlenecks both in the air and on the ground.These 13 airports together handled about 21.53 million passengers against their available capacity of 14.73 million. Airports like Patna and Nagpur, for instance, handle several times the amount of traffic than they were designed for. While Patna airport saw 2.11 million air passengers against a capacity of 0.70 million, Nagpur saw 1.89 million passengers against a capacity of 0.57 million. 
Ministry officials said due to the rising number of air travelers and the induction of more aircraft, air traffic in India in 2030-31 is estimated at 855 million passengers. 

To deal with this overload, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and other airport operators have initiated several steps, including the revival of unserved and under-served airports and construction of new greenfield airports. Officials said the expansion and development of airports is a continuous process undertaken by AAI, depending on traffic demand, operational requirements and availability of land. 

Recently, AAI has taken up the upgradation and development work of airports at Surat, Kolkata, Dimapur, Amritsar, Tezu, Port Blair, Hubli, Belgaum, Kishangarh, Gorakhpur, Jammu, Calicut, Pakyong, Agartala, Guwahati and Trivandrum. The AAI also plans to invest `20,178 crore between 2016-17 and 2021-22 to upgrade airport infrastructure and services. 

Currently, there are 98 operational airports in the country. Officials said there is enough capacity at major airports, including the national capital. Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport is not expected to reach saturation for at least four to six years, while the Chennai airport would reach its handling capacity by 2020-21.

A key component of the National Civil Aviation Policy released in June 2016 is Udan, which aims to promote regional connectivity by reviving un-served and under-served airports. Revival of such airports is demand-driven, depending on firm demand from the airline operators and where the state government agrees to provide various concessions envisaged in the policy. A comprehensive aviation capacity expansion programme, NABH (Next Gen Airports for Bharat Nirman), aims to ramp up airport and air space capacity. NABH Nirman, a multi-year programme, envisages expanding India’s aviation capacity over five times, to serve a billion passenger trips a year. 

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