India has hit a century of operational airports, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims that a third of them became operational during his tenure. In September, he inaugurated an airport in Jharsuguda in Odisha and another in Pakyong, Sikkim. While Jharsuguda had an airstrip and was developed with a terminal building, Pakyong was built from scratch. Modi claims that no other government had expanded the air network like his government has done through the UDAN connectivity scheme. The last time there was a frenzy of building modern terminals in place of tin roof sheds was when Madhavrao Scindia was civil aviation minister in the Narasimha Rao government. Scindia, a pilot, even flew aircraft to the decked-up airfields for the inaugural functions.
Modi has been focussing on air connectivity, and he sums it up in his own rhyming way: “Those who wear hawai chappals should travel by hawai jahaaz (aircraft).” He feels the UDAN scheme, which has linked up more than 50 towns, will boost jobs, trade and tourism. Much of the expansion has been introducing air services to existing airstrips or airports where operations had been suspended due to low traffic. Air India and private airlines have been asked to operate smaller aircraft on these routes.
Illustration: Bhaskaran
The Airports Authority of India, which had become rather anaemic during the Manmohan Singh government after losing control of airports in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bengaluru to private players, is seeing plenty of funds coming in for the development of smaller airports. AAI still controls the major airports of Kolkata, Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram.
India has more than 500 developed stretches where aircraft can land—ranging from small airstrips used by flying schools to the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, which has three long runways (the longest one is 4.4km). The Air Force controls more than 200 airstrips for operating fighter and transport aircraft. A few dozen are with the Army, the Navy and the paramilitary forces. Then there are airstrips controlled by flying clubs and industries. The passenger operations in Pune and Goa airports are done from civilian enclaves in military airports. Modi has been prodding his civil aviation ministers—first Ashok Gajapati Raju and then Suresh Prabhu—to ensure that every month a new civilian airport is ready for operation.
But airlines, hit by high fuel prices and low occupancy, are afraid that the compulsory operation to tier three and tier four airports would increase their losses. This is not the first time that the government has asked airlines to fly to remote areas. When the private airlines started operations, the state-owned carriers had demanded that they must share the burden of operating on the loss-making routes to the northeastern and northern hill states and to the Andaman. The government obliged. Interestingly, flights to Port Blair have become profitable thanks to the tourist rush.
UDAN has regulatory pricing, and as Modi said in Pakyong, an air ticket is cheaper than travelling by an air-conditioned coach in a train. Sikkim was the last state to get an airport, though it still does not have a rail link. The government’s next aim is to have a civilian airstrip in each of the 640 districts. In comparison, the US has around 500 airports that operate commercial flights and a third of the world’s 45,000 airfields.
sachi@theweek.in