Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Nov 25: The Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday laid the foundation stone for the Noida International Airport which when completed will become Asia’s largest airport, being built at Jewar in Gautam Buddh Nagar near Noida in Uttar Pradesh.
The Noida International Airport is spread across an area of 5,000 acres and is being developed by Zurich International Airport AG at an estimated cost of Rs 29,560 crore. The Swiss Airport company had won the bid in November 2019 following which a concessionaire agreement had been signed with the state government.
Speaking on the occasion, Modi said Noida International Airport would become the “logistics gateway of northern India” and would put Noida and UP on the global map. With the UP state Assembly elections just about a couple of months away, both Modi and the UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath used the occasion to slam the opposition parties, particularly the Congress and the Samajwadi Party while the aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia claimed that the airport only fulfill Modi’s dream that Asia’s largest airport should be built in the country’s most populous state, UP.
“Congratulations to the people of Uttar Pradesh for the ground-breaking of the Noida International Airport. It will put Noida and western UP on the global map… will be the “logistics gateway of northern India,” he said at the ceremony which was his first public event in western UP since scrapping the farm laws. Many protesting farmers come from this part of poll-bound UP.
“Today, 21st century India is seeing one mega infrastructure project after another. These do not just have a direct impact on the local population… but also transforms the entire region,” the Prime Minister said, as he flagged work on the Noida airport and those in Kushinagar (inaugurated by him last month) and the proposed Ayodhya airport.
“Farmers in the region will be able to export their vegetables, fruits and produce directly to the world,” PM Modi told a crowd of thousands from a platform surrounded, for the most part, by acres of villages, small towns and farms. The airport will also have a maintenance, repair, and overhaul facility for domestic and international carriers. “Today 85% of aircraft go foreign countries for maintenance on which Rs 15,000 crore is spent. A large chunk of this goes to foreign countries. This MRO facility will transform the city,” Modi said.
The Prime Minister also took swipes at the opposition ahead of the 2022 Assembly election and the 2024 Lok Sabha election, declaring: “So many projects in UP shelved by previous governments because. This too was suggested to be shelved… but then came the BJP’s double-engine government and development picked up.”
Ahead of the Prime Minister’s visit and the foundation stone ceremony, the Noida airport ran into controversy over protests from farmers whose lands had been acquired. Camped in tents barely 700 metres away, they have said they were either not paid or not given alternative housing. A local BJP MLA admitted that the land had been acquired in a hurry.
Speaking before Modi, Yogi Adityanath again attacked the rival SP leader Akhilesh Yadav as “followers of Jinnah” accusing him of fermenting trouble in the state’s sugarcane belt. The people would have to choose between the “sweetness of sugarcane and mischief by followers of Jinnah who are up to creating trouble for the people of the state,” Adityanath remarked.
“Some people had tried to add bitterness in the sugarcane region (western parts) of Uttar Pradesh with a series of riots. Now the country has to decide if the sweetness of sugarcane will grow or Jinnah’s followers will cause mischief,” Adityanath said, as he addressed the gathering of thousands in the presence of Modi.
Samajwadi Party leader and former UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav had last month listed Jinnah along with Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, saying they all helped India achieve independence. “Sardar Patel, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Jinnah studied at the same institute and became barristers. They became barristers and they fought for India’s freedom. They never backed away from any struggle,” said the Samajwadi Party chief, addressing a rally. His remarks had invited severe criticism from the ruling BJP, among others with Yogi Adityanath calling it “shameful” and a sign of “Talibani mentality.”
“Twenty years back the BJP government saw the dream of constructing an international airport here. However, it got stuck due to the tussle of previous govts sitting at Lucknow and Delhi. Even the previous state govt wrote a letter to stop the project. But now we are witnessing its ‘bhumi pujan’,” Modi claimed attacking the opposition parties.
When fully operational, the Noida International Airport is expected to serve around 1.2 crore passengers per year, with Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Agra, Faridabad, and nearby areas set to benefit. It will also decongest traffic in and around IGI airport, the centre has said.
Connectivity will be handled by a “multimodal transit hub” with metro and high-speed rail, as well as taxi and bus, services, the Prime Minister said, as he listed plans for major roads and expressways linking the airport.
The cargo terminal will have a capacity of 20 lakh tonnes and this can be expanded to 80 lakh tonnes. The airport, the centre said, would facilitate “seamless movement of industrial products” and help boost industrial growth in the region. Billed as India’s first ‘net zero emissions’ airport, the centre also land will be set aside for a ‘forest.’
Uttar Pradesh has eight operational airports at present, including international airports in Lucknow and Varanasi (Prime Minister Modi’s constituency). A third was inaugurated at Kushinagar (a Buddhist pilgrimage site) last month and a fourth – in the temple town of Ayodhya – which the BJP has grand plans to convert into a religious tourism centre.
The first phase of development of Noida International Airport is expected to be completed by September 2024 when it will have one runway, one terminal building with a capacity to handle 1.2 crore passengers per annum. The airport will be developed in four phases till 2040 by when it will have the capacity to handle seven crore passengers.
Yogi Adityanath has hailed the airport project as “monumental” for residents in Western UP and the NCR region. The airport is part of the government’s aviation push to bring operational flights to smaller cities. A concession agreement was signed in October last year with the concessionaire, Yamuna International Airport Private Limited (YIAPL), an SPV of the bid winner Zurich International Airport AG. In 2019, The Zurich Airport offered a bid of Rs 400.97 per passenger followed by a bid of Rs 360 by Adani Group and emerged as the winner.
Noida International Airport Limited, a joint venture, was incorporated as a government organisation in which UP government has 35%, Noida Authority 35%, Greater Noida Industrial Authority 12.5% while Yamuna Expressway Industrial Authority has 12.5% share holding.
Jewar Airport is located about 72 km from the existing IGI Airport in New Delhi, 40 km from Noida, and about 40 km from the multi-modal logistics hub at Dadri. The airport will have multi-modal connectivity owing to its proximity to the existing Yamuna Expressway (Greater Noida to Agra), close to Eastern Peripheral Expressway and it will be linked with Delhi-Mumbai Expressway at Ballabhgarh, Khurja-Jewar NH 91, dedicated freight corridor, Metro Extension from Noida to NIA and the proposed High Speed Rail (Delhi-Varanasi) at airport terminal. A 60-meter wide road parallel to the Expressway proposed to be widened to 100 metres.
The idea for an airport in Jewar was mooted during Rajnath Singh’s tenure as UP CM in 2001. In 2010, the then CM, Mayawati, proposed a Taj Aviation Hub, which did not make any headway. Between 2012 and 2016, the SP government took forward the idea of an international airport in Jewar and Agra. In 2017, the government obtained site clearance for the Jewar airport. In 2019, the technical and financial bids were announced and a developer to construct the airport was decided upon.
In July this year, the CM sanctioned the handing over of 1,334 hectare land to Noida International Airport Ltd (NIAL) under a 90-year land lease agreement.
Presently, the development plan of the airport is under scrutiny and will receive sanctions in the coming weeks. The process for land acquisition for the second phase has begun, officials said. In the first 1,334 hectare of land was acquired from seven villages. Phase I of the airport will have a capacity to serve 12 million passengers a year and is scheduled to be completed in three years. In each phase, the airport will expand to serve 70 million passengers by the end of phase 4, depending on passenger growth and traffic.
