Get ready to pay a fee to use even those airports which are under the aegis of Airport Authority of India (AAI).
Get ready to pay a fee to use even those airports which are under the aegis of Airport Authority of India (AAI).
Civil aviation minister Praful Patel said on Thursday a development fee will be levied at Kolkata, Chennai, Goa, Thiruvananthapuram and Ahmedabad airports. Till now, such a fee had been levied at airports developed through the public-private partnership model — Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi — but the ministry was hesitant in charging fliers for development of AAI-owned airports. AAI is a state-run company tasked with development and maintenance of civil airports.
The airport development charge is usually picked up directly from consumers, over and above the ticket price. Mumbai International Airport has also sought the Centre’s nod to levy a development fee.
Patel said consumers have to be willing to pay to use quality infrastructure while deflecting questions on why fliers should pay for using the Delhi International Airport (DIAL), which would be using the money received to create infrastructure for the future.
DIAL has been permitted to charge Rs 200 from domestic passengers and Rs 1,300 from international passengers. The amount collected would be used to bridge the Rs 1,827 crore funding gap the project is facing.
In Bangalore and Hyderabad, a development fee was levied after the respective airports had been completely developed.
DIAL, being developed by a consortium led by the GMR group, handles about 26 million passengers now. It is being developed to handle 60 million passengers by next year.
A new, bigger departure terminal was inaugurated on Thursday, which will raise the airport’s domestic departure capacity to 10 million passengers immediately. Creation of this terminal was not part of the concession agreement signed between the GMR-led consortium and the government and it has been built to ease capacity constraints for domestic travel at a cost of about Rs 500 crore.
On an average, 60% of all passengers going through DIAL are domestic; the rest are headed abroad. In 2007, about 24 million passengers used DIAL and rough estimates for 2008 peg this figure at 26 million.
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