The spectacular success of the new Terminal 3 (T3) at the Capital’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport says volumes for the distance India’s infrastructure story has travelled. From a time when the IGI Airport was among the worst in the world, T3 is now among the biggest — it’s too early to say, but from what you see of it, the airport’s functioning promises to be world class. With 48 boarding gates, 78 aerobridges and 168 check-in counters, it’s difficult to see how it won’t be. It is already there in terms of size. T3 is much bigger than Singapore’s Changi Terminal 3 and 2 put together, and it is also bigger than Seoul’s Incheon. With a capacity to handle 34 million passengers, it is, though, smaller than Dubai’s Terminal 3, which can handle 60 million passengers, and Beijing’s Terminal 3, which handles 43 million. All of this, keep in mind, has been accomplished in the space of around four years and was done without disrupting existing operations in the airport in any major way (building a greenfield airport, as in Bangalore and Hyderabad, is obviously a much easier task) — more important, this is when there weren’t even proper drawings of the old airport’s wiring and other facilities, leaving the GMR-led consortium to come across new surprises virtually every day. What this also means is that, within a space of a few years, the bulk of India’s air traffic is being serviced from modern state-of-the-art airports. The fact that consortiums such as the GMR one are now building overseas airports also shows just how far India’s infrastructure firms have come. The speed at which the Delhi Metro was executed, similarly, is a sign of the achievements being made.
The transformation of the airport, of course, shows the existing public sector Airports Authority of India in very poor light, considering how little it did at a time when it had a complete monopoly over airport infrastructure in the country. The T3 project also raises some important, if disturbing, issues. For one, the controversy over favouritism in the marking of bidders showed just how easy it was to game the system — it was after the dogged opposition by the planning commission that the marking system was set aside as unfair and it was then that the GMR consortium came into the reckoning. Similarly, there was the controversy over how the deposits GMR got from the 250 acres of land it got for commercial development were to be treated. The aviation ministry believed the contract specified the money had to be shared with it; this led to a stand-off and by the time GMR was given a diluted go-ahead which allowed it to take interest-free deposits for half the period initially proposed by it, the real estate market had tanked. It is unfortunate that things were allowed to reach a stage where the entire project almost got derailed. Similarly, the sharp escalation in airport costs also cast a shadow over how infrastructure projects are to be financed. Now that we’ve got the fruits of a well-executed public-private partnership (PPP) project, and that too executed in record time, we need to draw appropriate lessons to ensure that the avoidable aspects of the project don’t get repeated.
