The Airports Authority of India is waiting for the concession agreement for the development of Udaipur and Amritsar airports to be finalised.
Once finalised, this agreement will be a model for developing four other non-metro airports in Jaipur, Lucknow, Ahmedabad and Bhubaneswar, the requests for proposals (RFPs) for which are expected to be issued soon, sources in the Airports Authority of India (AAI) said.
Sources further added that the Planning Commission had three rounds of discussions with various stakeholders, including the builders and financial institutions, to finalise the agreement.
Following this, the suggestions given by the parties involved, including the AAI, were incorporated in the draft agreement for the development of airports under the public-private partnership model.
“Now we have the draft concession agreement with us which is now being vetted legally. Once the government clears the agreement, this would become the document through which we can finish the tenders,” said AAI executive director V K Kalra.
Earlier, following the RFPs by the government for the Amritsar and Udaipur brownfield airport projects, many companies had bid for the tenders. Of them, five companies each have been short-listed for the two projects.
The winner will be finalised once the concession document is ready. The agreement will clearly outline the scope of the works, for both the developer as well as the government, and how the entire airport operations will be monitored.
In the second phase, the government is planning to issue RFPs for the four other non-metro brownfield projects, which are expected in the next 3-4 months. This will be followed by expansion of the airports in Trichy and Visakhapatnam.
“These are the existing brownfield airports for which we are undertaking the expansion. The process for the second batch is also the same. We wanted to do it in batches and get the experience, which will help us finish the rest of the projects quickly,” said Kalra.
Even though the government has signed four concession agreements, including two greenfield (Bangalore and Hyderabad) and two brownfield (Delhi and Mumbai) projects, these were essentially meant for metro airports.
The civil aviation ministry has set a target of getting around 500 airports operational in the country by 2020. Thus would include renovation of unused airports, apart from developing greenfield airports, and establishing merchant airports dedicated to the movement of cargo and logistics.
