On Monday, the Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL), a joint venture led by GVK, won the bid to develop a new airport in Navi Mumbai. The total estimated cost of the Navi Mumbai International Airport, or NMIA, is Rs 16,000 crore.
Initially, four entities - MIAL, GMR Airports, MIA Infrastructure (joint venture of Tata Realty and VINCI Airport Concessions) and Voluptas Developers Pvt. Ltd. (consortium of Hiranandani Group and Zurich Airports) - had shown interest in building the greenfield airport.
The financial bids were submitted by just two - GMR Airports and MIAL. MIAL won because it has offered to share 12.6 per cent of the annual gross revenues with City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO), the nodal government agency, as against 10.44 per cent offered by GMR Airports. The final decision on awarding the project will be taken by state cabinet soon. MIAL currently operates the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA). Here's a lowdown on the benefits of NMIA for Mumbai.
1. In 2016, Mumbai airport handled around 44 million passengers - domestic and international. The airport's current capacity is around 55 million passengers but with airside constraints related to runway throughput and apron infrastructure, the airport cannot handle more than 48 million passengers. It's expected that the airport will reach its saturation point by 2018. A new airport will help ease congestion at the existing airport.
2. The current airport has two runways - main runway (09/27) and secondary runway (14/32). The runways are repaired at regular intervals. Last November, both these runways were partially shut down for repairs leading to mass-scale cancellation of flights. An estimated 2,100 flights were cancelled during that phase.
3. The delays at Mumbai airports are rampant, as indicated in the on-time performance (OTP) of most carriers. For instance, in December 2016, five airlines, including Air India, SpiceJet, IndiGo, GoAir and Vistara, registered their lowest on-time performance in Mumbai among four key metro airports - Delhi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Mumbai. Air India was worst hit with more than half of its flights delayed in Mumbai. 4. The proposal to build an airport in Navi Mumbai is pending since 1997. The NMIA has a commencement deadline of October 2019 which is most likely to be missed. Aviation experts say that the airport will not be able to start operations before 2020. As per the initial plan for NMIA, the airport would handle 60 million passengers (per annum) at its peak by 2030. By that time, the total passenger traffic of Mumbai is most likely to exceed the total capacity at both CSIA and NMIA, and the city would likely require a third airport.