No plan to relax rules on distance between 2 airports, says govt

Government on Tuesday said it has no plan to amend rules regarding the mandatory 150 km distance between two airports.

Responding to a supplementary during the Question Hour in Rajya Sabha, Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju answered in the negative to a question if government was planning to amend the existing rules in this regard.

Minister of State for Civil Aviation Mahesh Sharma had recently said that his ministry was looking at tweaking the norms to allow a second greenfield airport within a 150-km radius of an existing one in the context of developing a new airport at Jewar in Greater Noida on Delhi's outskirts.

Raju said government has granted in-principle approval for setting of 15 greenfield airports - four each in Maharashtra and Karnataka, two in Kerala and one each in West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Sikkim, Puducherry and Uttar Pradesh.

He also said there are 31 airports in the country from where no flight either took off or landed for quite some time now and the government was inviting airlines to use such airports.