Saibaba Temple at Shirdi will be commemorating Sai Baba Samadhi Centenary Utsav in 2017-18, the operations will facilitate devotees travel to the town then.
The state government is planning to operationalise the Greenfield Shirdi airport by this October. This will allow operation of scheduled flights for devotees who will throng the temple town located in Ahmednagar district for the Sai Baba Samadhi Centenary Utsav in 2017-18.
"We are planning to commission the Shirdi airport by October. The process and construction is already underway... Over 95% of the works are over and we hope to complete the remaining, including getting the aerodrome licence from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) soon. Once this licence is secured, we hope to start operation of regular flights," a senior state government official told dna.
"We will have to speed up these works in view of the centenary celebrations next year," the official said. He added that the issue had been discussed in a recent meeting of the Maharashtra Airport Development Company Limited (MADC) chaired by chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. The airport, which is located at Kakadi near Shirdi over 350 hectares, has a 2,500-metre long runway.
Its operationalisation is expected to boost religious tourism to the temple town, which sees massive footfall of devotees of the spiritual guru from India and abroad, and also promote industrial development. Shirdi has a daily floating population of around 1 lakh, which rises to 1.5 lakh on festivals and weekends. Lack of dedicated air connectivity means that visitors have to fly down to either Mumbai, Pune or Aurangabad and then come to Shirdi by road.
The state cabinet has already decided to undertake remaining works on the airport through the MADC instead of going in for the PPP model for Phase-II. These include expansion of the runway to 3,200 metres, expanding the capacity of the terminal building to handle 300 passengers per hour, baggage scanner machine, ATC tower, firefighting systems, including a building, DVOR and night-landing facilities and isolation way, and water supply schemes. "We will gauge the traffic growth and then, based on these projections, undertake the expansion of the airport to prevent saturation," the official said.
The Shirdi Sai Temple Trust has contributed Rs 45 crore for the around Rs 364 crore airport. The official said they had decided to drop plans for the construction of a new airport in Solapur and instead focus on using the existing 1,800-metre airstrip, which can land planes like the ATR 72. "At the most, just two to three flights will land at the airport daily. Hence, there is no need to spend Rs 500 crore for a new airport. However, a chimney of a sugar factory is intruding in the airport's funnel and, hence, we will ask them to remove it so that the old airport can be put to use," he added.
The runway at the Belora airport in Amravati will be extended to 1,850 metres from the existing 1,400 metres to allow for smaller planes to land and operate. Maharashtra has around 29 airports and airstrips, the highest in India, of which five (Navi Mumbai, Parule-Chipi, Pune, Solapur and Shirdi) are under construction or proposed, two are private (Amby Valley and Shirpur) and one is not in use (Phaltan). The Gondia and Nanded airports have night-landing facilities.
Despite having the highest number of airports and airstrips in India, only four airports — Mumbai, Nagpur, Aurangabad and Nagpur — are commercially operational. Presently, these smaller airports lack scheduled flights and cater to only smaller aircraft. The Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport will reach its saturation point in a few years even as work on the proposed Navi Mumbai International Airport is yet to begin.
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 "Shirdi Airport Prakash Parsekar")
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