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The Airports Authority of India (AAI), which was supposed to announce the name of shortlisted bidders today for the management of Chennai Airport, has decided to postpone this to December last week. A source in the know said GVK was the front runner for the over Rs 2,000 crore contract.
An official from the AAI said the date of announcement had been postponed to December 23, 2013. The decision now had to come from the Ministry of Civil Aviation, added the official.
GVK is one of the nine companies that has shown interest in the Chennai airport. The others include IL&FS Transportation Networks Ltd, Essar Projects (India) Ltd, Essel Infraprojects Ltd, CIAL, Fraport Saudi Arabia – KAIA, Abdullah Kirimli (Celebi Havacilik Holdings AS), GMR Airports Limited and Sahara Group.
When contacted, GVK spokesperson said, “GVK has always been open to exploring opportunities in the airport sector. We will study proposal of the current round of privatisation and decide on our extent of participation.”
On October 8, representatives from the nine companies came to Chennai for a ‘familiarisation trip’, as part of the plans to have a public private partnership (PPP) for the operation, management and transfer of Chennai Airport.
According to an announcement by the AAI, the visit was as per the request for qualification (RFQ) for operation, management and transfer of the airport through a PPP floated by the AAI.
The Centre plans to privatise six airports in the country and recently floated an RFQ for managing Chennai and Lucknow airports.
In Chennai, around 400 employees of the Airport Authority Employees Union (AAEU) conducted a demonstration at the airport, on October 8, against this restricting company representatives from entering into the airport.
The employee union argues they would lose job security if the facility gets privatised, even as the government assured no such thing against the privatisation. It had also conducted a relay hunger strike in connection with this.
The union says the authority has recently completed two new terminals with a total investment of over Rs 2,000 crore, and privatising at this juncture would increase the user development fee and airport development fee for customers.
The AAI had earlier launched a new domestic and international terminals with an investment of around Rs 2,015 crore. The authority is expecting the period for pay back to be nearly 10 years.
