A grim prognosis in the air

Adding to Mumbai's list of woes is an airport that's bursting at the seams

Imagine this scenario. The month is December — peak season for air travel into India. December is usually the time when foreign tourists, friends, relatives and all and sundry descend in Mumbai from all over the world.

What you can add to this is congestion at the Mumbai airport due to fog in Delhi and other parts of the country, resulting in some chaos all around. Flights routinely get diverted even to Mumbai, although it's already brimming over.

In addition to the above scene, imagine one day of Mumbai’s new incessant and uncontrolled rains with strong winds — the kind that brought the city to a grinding halt last month.

As a senior commander I was chatting with the other day said, “This is the stuff of nightmares for us.” Of course airlines, air traffic controllers, passengers and the airport staff would all dread this picture but the last place in this scenario you’d want to find yourself in is the aircraft cockpit, trying to land or take off.

As we chatted he went into some detail of how choked Mumbai’s airport already is. The airport stopped allocating new slots two years ago (in 2015). It has been kept out of the regional connectivity scheme — there are no slots available to be handed out for this. The airport — which has shown huge improvement in the number of movements per hour — is in fact often quite close to as many movements an hour as many good European airports. There are 46 parking bays in Mumbai and perhaps a few more could be added if space was used more efficiently. General aviation can be squeezed a bit more to make space for commercial airlines.

But at best, improvements in efficiency and management can help marginally. In other words, there’s no huge scope to make a quantum leap.

Now you will understand why what I am going to say next is really bad news. The Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) — in the making till kingdom come — is not about to be ready in a hurry.

Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha recently made a statement that he expected the first phase of the airport to be operational by 2020, but he’s quite alone in this as no one involved with the project expects this. In fact those involved with the project privately say that the new airport is unlikely to see the light of day till — hold your breath — 2025. Another eight long years away! State officials and those in the know have even started mulling over a new airport site at Kalyan but others say it’s more like a shot in the dark than any serious intent.

Phew! If this isn’t bad news for Mumbai, what is? Now, you may ask, when the new airport has been in the works for so long why on earth it is still not ready.

Three major reasons. One, the bid was won in February 2017 by Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) that runs the airport but it has received no award letter from CIDCO, the government agency handling the project.

Why no letter? It seems the Centre — and some state officials — are not convinced of the ability of GVK (the majority stakeholder in MIAL) to raise the money required to carry out the project. It’s no secret that the balance sheets of many Indian infrastructure companies including GVK are heavily stretched with no clear remedy in sight.

Two, even if the letter comes, there are many bridges, hills and rivers to be crossed at the site itself. I will list just four. There’s a hill that needs to be cut, a large marshy swamp that needs a massive landfill before any work can commence, a river that needs diverting and roughly three villages that need to be moved from their present location — where the proposed runway will be — before work can begin. Essentially, the site that was chosen is one of the “worst possible in more ways than one” for an airport to come up in but it's all Mumbai could find.

And three, the airport is one of the most politicised projects in the state with every party using it to its own advantage. The politics of it all has cost the project at least five extra years, say people involved with it. Even those who put their weight behind it lose steam when they realise that it may not be ready during their tenure and the credit may go to a rival. The new NMIA — if and when it materialises — will be despite the politician, not thanks to him.