At best, it is yet another instance of flogging a dead issue. That precisely seems to be the outcome of the report of the joint house committee (JHC) of the Karnataka legislature which examined the construction of Bangalore International Airport.
Beyond stating the obvious that has been articulated, not once but a hundred times by interested parties, the report that seems to suggest a skew in favour of BIAL from the very beginning, does not fix responsibility.
If the JHC, for instance, was unhappy over the specifics in the concession agreement which was the basis for building a greenfield international airport, it could have pulled up the union government which drew up and signed the concession agreement. If the committee was sure that the state government had given more than what was necessary to BIAL, it could have at least tried to figure out who actually was responsible for that.
Instead, it merely provides a list of all officials and civilians appointed by the state to the board of BIAL and suggests appropriate action against them. The report is more or less a chronological story of BIAL with some general observations thrown in good measure and many suggestions that defy logic. It would like you to believe that the concession agreement was flawed and not necessarily in the interest of the state. It does not however say so directly but suggests that any proposed project in the public private participation (PPP) model should not let go of public (meaning either state or bureaucratic) supremacy.
This and other equally important issues such as the public demand for reopening HAL airport have been argued sufficiently, including in the courts of law. Some of those cases are still pending, thus rendering the views of JHC somewhat superfluous. Even if you do not go back in history why the search for an alternative to HAL started in the early eighties, the decision to shut HAL was taken formally in 1999 by the union government to develop another airport with private participation.
That and other provisions of the concession agreement have the stamp of the union government giving it the weight of a sovereign commitment. The government, of course, has a right to review its commitments but there are consequences; the foremost, as some industry leaders have said, being the credibility of the state itself.
Beyond this key issue, many other recommendations are pretty minor and routine in nature. Some, such as treating all state expenditure, including setting up power and water facilities and widening the national highway to carry additional traffic, as equity to force the private parties to pump in more equity is somewhat rhetorical.
JHC would like us to believe that BIAL is not a world-class airport comparable to Changi in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. That, too, was obvious at the very outset if you look at a couple of factoids the committee itself has provided. Changi has a capacity of 74 million passengers per annum. BIAL handles about 11.5 million. Changi cost $ 1.3 billion in 1981. At today’s prices it would be a multiple of that figure.
Kuala Lumpur, built 10 years ago to handle 35 million passengers, cost $3.5 billion. BIAL cost less than half a billion US dollars. BIAL is international only because it handles international traffic. It was probably not designed to rival any of the big international hubs.
The panel could have been more enlightening if it had made a cost comparison with Hyderabad which was also a greenfield project taken up at the same time and on the basis of similar conditions as BIAL. Instead of nitpicking, it could have suggested specific steps to make this airport as good as the one at Hyderabad.
Finally, JHC specifically drew up a list of 18 points of deficiencies and, to be fair to it, detailed how these were being addressed by BIAL. Many are valid and have been sorted out. Curiously, the first three points are about a lack of reserved lounge for VIPs (provided after the panel’s visit to BIAL), lack of public relation officer to guide such VIPs and lack of specific (read privileged) parking for VIPs. Congestion at the departure lounge is item 18 on the list.
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