Don't Dial just yet

Most people would agree that the Bahujan Samaj Party chief, Ms Mayawati, will play a crucial role in the next general elections, but the attempt to woo her by clearing her government's proposal to build an airport at Noida, 68 km from the existing one in Delhi, is a bad idea. People build new airports, or start planning for new ones, when the existing airports cannot handle the present or expected traffic. In that sense, planning for a new airport in Mumbai makes sense since there is a limit beyond which the current one cannot cater to growing traffic. In Delhi, however, it is claimed that the newly privatised airport is being expanded to handle 100 million passengers by 2030. Compared to the 20 million passengers that flew into and out of Delhi last year, traffic is projected to rise to 80 million by 2020. If this is indeed the case, planning a new airport so close by will affect the fortunes of Delhi International Airport Ltd, the entity that is investing nearly Rs 9,000 crore to expand the existing airport. If traffic gets diverted to a new airport when there is spare capacity still available, you could end up with two unviable airports instead of one strong one. It is for this reason that the aviation policy recommends that no new airports be built within 150 km of each other. In the Delhi context, the argument that a second airport will bring in competition does not really hold, given the facts on the ground. Under the privatisation programme, an airport regulator is to be in place soon, and its job will be to ensure that customers are not ripped off, that international benchmarks are used, and so on "" the same kind of monitoring that is done in other large infrastructure projects involving the provision of electricity and running of ports. Why do airports need to be treated differently?

There is also the issue of whether the proposal for a new airport is fair, since the bids for the Delhi airport would have been quite different if it had been made clear that a Noida airport was going to be built so soon. It is true that the government had kept its options open by saying the right of first refusal for the Noida airport would lie with the firm that built the first airport in Delhi, but people can be forgiven for thinking that the government was serious about honouring its own aviation policy.

An unrelated issue concerns providing a level playing field. The Delhi airport specifies that 90 per cent of all planes landing or taking off must have aerobridges "" which means as many as 75 of them. Similarly, Delhi levies very high sales taxes on aviation turbine fuel, which accounts for a significant chunk of any airline's operating costs. When the Noida airport comes up, there is no certainty that it will have either the same specifications (read costs) or the same duty levels "" in which case, DIAL will be at a definite disadvantage. It could well be that the government is using the threat of a new airport to bring DIAL around on the manner in which it has interpreted its existing contract on the sharing of revenues, but one dispute should not lead to two bad investments.