In its Feb 22 edition this year, The Telegraph reported that the Tatas and Singapore’s Changi Airport’s investment arm will jointly bid for Kolkata airport’s modernization. Thereafter doubts arose about it since left parties wanted the job to be done by state-run AAI (Airports Authority of India) instead of private parties.
The cloud over the issue has at last cleared. It’s now apparent that while AAI will be monitoring it, the work itself will be contracted out to private company. The cost of project is taken as Rs.1500 crore.
As per today’s news, the DPR or detailed project report is being readied, after which AAI will invite global tender for the project. By September the contract is expected to be finalized, and the work would begin early next year, to be completed by mid-2010 ahead of Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
At present Kolkata’s NSC Bose International Airport has 3 terminal buildings, international, national and cargo, and 2 parallel runways of which one is used for landing and taking off of aircrafts while the other is mostly used as taxiways.
Under the new proposed plan, there will be 2 new terminals. One, an integrated large one for domestic and international flights will annually cater to 16 million passengers. The other, a smaller version with capacity to serve 4 million passengers annually will see only international flights.
Both will have facilities for ground-floor arrival and first-floor departure, a practice followed in many busy airports allover the world.
These apart, the new plan also envisages 4-5 state-of-the-art aerobridges, new parking bays, 2 new car parks with double the present capacity, and upgrading of road networks in and around airport including underpasses and flyovers while approaching the airport from VIP Road. A third runway is also being planned.
As and when all these plans take fruit, Kolkata airport will compare with the best in the country, but perhaps even that would not be sufficient to cope with traffic pressure a decade down the line.
Which is why the state government has already started pressing for a totally new airport somewhere in the southern fringes of the city. But that is a separate story for another day.
Inside Changi – one of world’s finest airports. [Image top, bottom]
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