This refers to the edit “Undue benefits in aviation” (May 28). Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) has apparently taken a grim view of the user development fee – levied on passengers boarding from Delhi – which was not part of the Operations Maintenance and Development Agreement (OMDA) between the civil aviation ministry and the GMR group.
It is worth highlighting that the OMDA for the Delhi airport was signed by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) in 2006 with the GMR group whereas the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority (AERA) was set up in 2008. The AERA was given the mandate to fix aeronautical or non-aeronautical charges for all the major airports in the country. This may have caused a mismatch between the user fee levied earlier and its subsequent regulation by AERA instead of AAI.
Moreover, there was an almost 40 per cent cost escalation in the project execution cost of DIAL — an unusual occurrence for a public-private partnership contract in which such important parameters are subjected to rigorous pre-evaluation and scrutiny with due diligence. What is perhaps the icing on the cake is that despite a 20 per cent growth rate in aviation traffic at the Delhi airport over the past few years, there has been an additional steep increase in airport fee — for both embarking and disembarking passengers. Incidentally, one must also examine what effective use are the now defunct airports at Hyderabad and Bengaluru being put to? There is enormous locking up of public sector land and other assets that also need a systematic review.
Kalpana Dube Lucknow
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