 "Jyotiraditya M. Scindia")
The Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIAL) is expected to start commercial operations by the end of March 2025, Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia said on Saturday.
The revised timeline comes a day after Scindia while speaking to reporters in Nagpur said the airport will become operational by December this year.
“Internally, we are still pushing for the December-end target for this year. There are two projections of commencement of operations that one receives; one is overestimated, and the other is a realistic projection. I have kept a cushion of three months with a hope that we'll be able to push this forward a little bit,” Scindia said while addressing the press today.
Adani Group, the parent company of NMIAL, in an investor presentation in April last year, had stated that the airport was on track to start commercial operations by December 2024.
However, aviation consultancy firm CAPA in its report published in October 2023 had stated that Navi Mumbai airport’s construction was facing delays, and therefore, was likely to commence commercial operations in 2025 instead of 2024.
When asked about this matter in the same month, Adani Group had told Business Standard that the Navi Mumbai airport project was "being executed as per scheduled implementation plan and will be operational by the original target date of December, 2024, without any delay".
Meanwhile, the entire construction of the airport is expected to be completed in five phases, with the first two phases now being operationalised with a revised timeline of March 2025.
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“Around 55 to 60 per cent of the physical and financial progress of the project's first two phases has been completed… Before beginning commercial operations, the airport has to get necessary permissions from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), runway calibration, among others,” he said.
Along with NMIAL, Scindia explained that the government aims to create over 200 airports in the country in the next six years and double domestic passenger traffic in the country from the present 150 million to 300 million by 2030.
On the ground, the runway, terminal building, and the air traffic controller (ATC) tower are being constructed at full-swing with over 10,000 workers on duty.
Close to 2.9 kilometres (kms) of the 3.7 kms runway has been constructed to date, airport officials said.
Within the premises, multiple cranes can be seen constructing the terminal building. That said, barring the roof, only the outer structure of this building has been partially built.
Exactly behind the under-construction building, stands a partially- demolished hill.
Executives from the airport company were hopeful the hill will be flattened by mid-January, Business Standard reported last month. However, the hill still stands in place to date with excavators cutting through the elevation, and it may take ‘some more time’ to be flattened completely.
The hill was to be demolished in a joint effort by Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL), who is the concessionaire and Cidco- City and Industrial Development Corporation for Navi Mumbai, which is the nodal authority for the project, as reported earlier.
Similarly, officials at the airport expect the construction of the ATC tower to be completed by June this year, following which it would be handed over to the Airports Authority of India (AAI) for installing instruments such as communication and display systems, navigation aids, among others.
This will be an interim ATC to cater to the requirements of the single runway being constructed in the first two phases of operations.
This ATC is expected to be in service for five to seven years after commencing commercial operations.
As the construction of the project progresses over the next few years, another tower will be constructed near terminal buildings to provide coverage to two parallel runways, officials explained.
Meanwhile, the airport will have a capacity of handling 20 million passengers for the first two phases of operations.
Of the 20 million capacity in the initial phase, NMIAL is expected to fly 12 million passengers in the first year. Similarly, the capacity is set to grow to around 90 million passengers per year by 2032.
NMIAL, responsible for both the construction and operation of the airport, is a subsidiary of the Adani Group. MIAL is a jointly owned subsidiary of Adani Airport Holding Limited and Airport Authority of India (AAI.)
It is a jointly owned subsidiary with MIAL holding 74 per cent and the rest by Cidco.
The project is expected to cost around Rs 18,000 crore.
Meanwhile, it is the first airport in the country to have multi-modal connectivity. This includes a linkage to the project via road, rail and a metro system. In the near future, it is set to be connected via a waterway.
