Mumbai’s wait for a brand new airport is about to get over as the Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday. With this, India’s financial capital will join the league of global mega cities like New York, London, Moscow and Tokyo, among several others, that have multiple commercial airports.
The Navi Mumbai International Airport will soon be joined by Noida International Airport, the second major commercial airport in Delhi-NCR, which is set to be inaugurated towards the end of October.
Even as PM Modi is set to inaugurate the airport this week, commercial flight operations are expected from early December, once the security arrangements by CISF and other necessary things are in place.
The Navi Mumbai International Airport has been a long time coming. The idea of a new airport for Mumbai was first conceived in the late 1990s. By 2007, the Union cabinet gave its in-principle approval for a new greenfield airport in Navi Mumbai. Over the next few years, feasibility studies, environmental assessments, and master plans followed.
The bidding took place in 2017, and the project was awarded to Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL), owned by GVK. Gautam Adani’s Adani Airport Holdings took over MIAL in April 2021, thereby taking control of NMIA.
In July 2022, CIDCO (City and Industrial Development Corporation) handed over 2,866 acres of core land to Adani Airport Holdings. Construction has been happening at a rapid pace over the last two to three years, with validation of systems and infrastructure undertaken over the past year.
On October 11, 2024, an Indian Air Force C-295 aircraft made the first landing at the airport. A couple of months later, India’s largest airline, Indigo, conducted a commercial validation flight landing an Airbus A320 there. In September this year, NMIA received the Aerodrome License from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).
When it opens, in the first phase, it will handle 20 million passengers annually and 0.5 million tonnes of cargo, through one terminal and one runway. Eventually, when it is fully completed by 2040, the airport will have four passenger terminals and two runways, with a cumulative capacity of 90 million passengers and around 3.2 million tonnes of cargo.
The airport has been built at a cost of around Rs 19,647 crore, which will rise to around Rs 1 lakh crore, by the time construction of all the phases is complete.
Mumbai has grown leaps and bounds over the last few decades, with the city’s population estimated to be around 12.6 million. As the city grew, so did its aviation traffic and demand. However, there were limits to the extent the city’s current commercial airport – Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) – could grow, given that it is in the heart of the city and there’s hardly any space to expand.
CSMIA has been among the world’s busiest single-runway airports. It has two terminals and two runways, but the two intersect and therefore only one runway can be operated at a time. The airport has already hit its full capacity of 55 million.
India has been among the fastest-growing aviation markets in the world. Yet, given the capacity constraints at CSMIA, airlines struggled with the limited availability of slots. The new airport addresses those concerns.
“The existing Mumbai airport has faced capacity constraints, which benefited other airports. Airlines couldn’t obtain the slots they needed for additional flights from the city. The new airport will solve such constraints,” Jitendra Bhargava, former executive director at Air India, had told THE WEEK in an earlier interaction.
Leading Indian carriers—Indigo, Air India, and Akasa—have already announced operational plans from NMIA.
Air India Express, for instance, plans to operate 20 daily departures, or 40 Air Traffic Movements (ATMs) from and to NMIA connecting 15 Indian cities. By mid-2026, Air India Group intends to scale up to 55 daily departures (110 ATMs), including up to five daily international flights from that airport.
Indigo will operate 18 daily departures (36 ATMs) from NMIA, which will be increased to 79 daily departures (158 ATMs), including 14 international departures by November 2025 and further to over 100 departures (200 ATMs) by March 2026. By November 2026, the low-cost carrier intends to have 140 daily departures (280 ATMs), including 30 international departures.
Akasa Air plans to operate over 100 weekly domestic departures initially, scaling up to over 300 domestic and more than 50 international departures weekly in the winter schedule. The airline is also set to ramp up to 10 parking bases by the end of the financial year 2027, with a focused international expansion into key markets in West Asia and South East Asia.
NMIA is located near Panvel in Raigad district, east of South Mumbai and around 35 kilometres from CSMIA. A direct metro rail link between CSMIA and NMIA is being planned, but it is still years away. Till then, it is the existing roads from various parts of the city, including the Atal Setu, that will connect people to NMIA. The to be opened Targhar suburban railway station on the Belapur-Uran line will be the closest rail link, about 5 km away from the airport. A quick 40-minute water taxi service from Radio Club near Gateway of India to the new airport has also been planned.
NMIA will also be convenient for people from Pune, considering the distance will be just about 120 kilometers, shorter than the existing CSMIA, which is about 160 km. Upon opening, the airport is expected to be named after the late leader and social activist D.B. Patil.
