Govt says 25 more airports to be privatised in next 5 years; here’s complete list

KEY STORY 

• The government unveiled its plans to privatise 25 airports over the next five years under the National Monetization Pipeline (NMP), said Minister of State for Civil Aviation (Gen. (Dr) VK Singh in a written reply to Lok Sabha on Thursday.

• As per NMP, 25 (Airport Authority of India (AAI) airports have been earmarked for asset monetization over the years 2022 to 2025 namely Bhubaneshwar, Varanasi, Amritsar, Trichy, Indore, Raipur, Calicut, Coimbatore, Nagpur, Patna, Madurai, Surat, Ranchi, Jodhpur, Chennai, Vijayawada, Vadodara, Bhopal, Tirupati, Hubli, Imphal, Agartala, Udaipur, Dehradun and Rajahmundry.

• The MoS said the airports were selected as they met conditions for monetisation which stipulate annual traffic above 0.4 million passengers in FY 2019 and 2020 and a sizeable ongoing, proposed capes plan as per the National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP).

• According to Singh’s reply, all but four airports out of the country’s 137 were profitable in the pandemic year 2020-21. He was responding to MP Mimi Chakraborty’s query whether 136 AAI airports made profits or losses in the last 3 financial years.

• Singh said that except Kandala (0.11 crore), Kanpur Chakeri (6.07 crore), Bareilly (0.68 crores) and Porbandar (1.54 crores) all other airports suffered huge losses.

• Additionally, management, operations and development of 13 more airports including Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchirappalli International Airport will be done on Public-Private Partnership mode.

• “The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has identified Tiruchirappalli (Trichy) International Airport in Tamil Nadu among 13 airports for operations, management and development of the airports through Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode in public interest and for better management of the airports,” said MoCA in a statement.

• “Even after bringing these airports under PPP mode of operations, AAI will remain the owner of the airports and all these airports will revert to AAI once the Concession Period is over,” it added.

• AAI has recently awarded 6 airports Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram, Mangaluru for operations, management and development under PPP for a period of 50 years.

CONCLUSION

The airport body under MoCa’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) owns 136 airports in the country out of which, AAI has formed joint venture in 7 airports.

The 7 airports include Indira Gandhi International Airport (26%), Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, Mumbai (26%), Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad (13%), Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru (49%), Kannur International Airport, Kannur (7.47%), Chandigarh Airport, Chandigarh (51%).