NEW DELHI: The six airports which have been given green signal for private participation by the union cabinet recently are among the top earning airports of the Country. Airports including Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Mangaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, and Guwahati have been selected for operation, management and development through public private partnership.
According to information from the ministry of civil aviation, these six airports have revenue exceeding Rs 100 crores. While the income generated by the Airports authority of India from Ahmadabad airport was about Rs 374 crore in the year 2017-18, it was Rs 363 crore from Thiruvananthapuram airport.
Officials said that the plan for airports development, operation and management through PPP mode was earlier conceived in the UPA II regime during the end of the year 2013, however, it could not take off due to lack of consensus among different agencies including the planning commission and the ministry and the 2014 Lok Sabha polls was also approaching closer.
UPA-II government had in the year 2013 launched the PPP process for modernising six airports at Kolkata, Chennai, Jaipur, Guwahati, Ahmedabad and Lucknow. Sources said the decision to remove the airports at Chennai and Kolkata from the list has been taken considering the amount of investment that has already been pumped in to their development by the government.
As per the initial plan, the AAI will hold a minor stake, just like it does at the Delhi and Mumbai airports. The bidding will be held in a revenue-sharing model, where bidders will have to pay a specified share of gross revenue to the AAI as the concession fee.
Currently, Delhi airport operator GMR has to share 45.99 per cent of its revenue with the AAI every year. Similarly, GVK, which operates the Mumbai airport, shares 38.7 per cent of the revenue. Officials claimed that a major part of the AAI’s income and profits come from these two airports.
Government has a major plan of airport development in the country seeing the rising air traffic in Indian skies. This would entail a total expenditure of about Rs 2 trillion over the next 10 years, preparing it to handle 1 billion air trips per year. The government expects that a lion’s share of the investment would come from private players and officials claimed that more airports will also go into private hands in a similar way for operation development and management.
Officials said that the issues like high airport charges affecting the airlines will needed to be looked into while moving ahead on the private participation.