The Airports Authority of India (AAI) will complete the airport-side upgrade of 35 non-metro airports by the year-end.
“We will complete the airport-side upgrade of the 35 airports by the end of this year,” said a senior ministry official.
The official explained that every airport has two sides. One is the city side, which has parking space, hotel, restaurants and other amenities, while the airport side includes everything inside the airport.
The modernisation of the city-side development is part of the upgrade programme for the 35 non-metro airports in the country by 2010.
The authority is also planning to develop the city side of 24 airports, including Jaipur, Udaipur, Lucknow and Amritsar, on a public-private partnership (PPP) basis.
“At airports where we have land, we will deve-lop the city side on the PPP basis,” the official added.
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He said consultants were working on the PPP structure, to be used for these projects, and they would submit their report by the end of this month. “Only after we receive the reports, we will issue requests for qualification for the project,” he said.
In 2006, the AAI had planned to spend around Rs 6,440 crore on modernisation of 35 airports, including Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Guwahati, Jaipur, Lucknow, Patna, Port Blair, Ranchi, Chandigarh and Pune.
Earlier, there were rep-orts that the modernisation of at least seven of the 35 non-metro airports would be shelved following a reduction in revenue.