Accepting a proposal by the civil aviation ministry, Union cabinet, on Wednesday, given its nod for leasing out three airports of Airports Authority of India (AAI) through public-private partnership (PPP) model.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led cabinet accorded its approval for leasing of Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram airports for operation, management and development to Adani Enterprises Ltd. The Adani group won the rights in a global competitive bidding, conducted by the AAI, for a period of fifty years.
Prakash Javadekar, Union minister for information and broadcasting, announced the cabinet decision saying, "These projects will bring efficiency in service delivery, expertise, enterprise and professionalism, apart from harnessing the needed investments in the public sector."
The AAI owns and manages more than 100 airports across the country, and Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Puri, in a webinar on Tuesday, made it clear that his ministry has got many more airports lined up, and 100 new airports will be built between now and 2030.
Adani Enterprises had won the rights to run six airports— Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Mangaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, and Guwahati— after a competitive bidding process in February 2019. In February, 2020, the concessionaire agreement was signed by the group with the AAI for three airports— Ahmedabad, Mangaluru, and Lucknow. On July 3, the Union cabinet had approved the leasing out of Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Mangalore airports to Adani Group.
A decade ago, government had leased out the AAI's airports at Delhi and Mumbai on public-private partnership for operation, management and development.
Officials claim that while these PPP experiments have helped create world class airports and assisted in delivery of efficient and quality services to the airport passengers, "it has also helped AAI in enhancing its revenues and focusing on developing airports and air navigation infrastructure in the rest of the country".
As the AAI is a self-sustaining organisation, revenue received from PPP partners enabled AAI to create infrastructure facilities in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and also to upgrade their airports to international standards. The PPP airports in India are consistently ranked among the top five in their respective categories by the Airports Council International (ACI) in terms of Airport Service Quality (ASQ).
Hence, government decided to lease out more airports of AAI for operation, management and development under PPP through Public Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC). Government also constituted an Empowered Group of Secretaries (EGoS) to decide on any issue falling beyond the scope of PPPAC.
While the PPPAC approved the transaction documents, the entire bidding process was carried out under the supervision and directions of EGoS which comprised of representatives of NITI Aayog, Department of Expenditure and Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) of Ministry of Finance (MoF).
