AAI Chairman on Rs 25,000 cr infra investment, UDAN scheme and privatisation

Arvind Singh, the newly appointed chairman of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) on Thursday, announced that AAI was planning to undergo a massive infrastructure up-gradation over the next five years involving a whopping investment of Rs 25,000 crore. The Chairman stated that this was being done to ensure holistic development across the aviation sector in the country. The Chairman also stated that the country was witnessing a growth in the number of flyers due to which better capacity needed to be developed. "Currently, we are handling 315 million passengers. It is expected that an additional 550 million passengers will be augmented, which takes the total traffic to around 900 million passengers. We have to go for capacity building accordingly."

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"We need a huge amount of investment several billions of dollars to ensure holistic infrastructure up-gradation in the aviation sector across the country. We will invest about Rs 25,000 crore to augment facilities and infrastructure at the airports during the next five years," said Singh. 

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AAI Chairman on the UDAN scheme

Arvind Singh also spoke about the Centre's UDAN scheme. "UDAN or 'Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik' is a regional connectivity scheme launched by the government to make unserved or underserved airports in small cities operational with regular flights, by offering subsidised airfares in an attempt to encourage more people to take up flying. "We are working on this scheme. The plan is to double the number of airports in the country. The major challenge under the UDAN scheme is that many routes have been awarded, but the bidders have not come to operationalise the routes. There is also a challenge to find newer routes," said the AAI Chairman. He also stated that there was  aconsiderabel amount of growth in the air traffic in Tier-II and Tier-III cities. 

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AAI Chairman on privatisation 

The AAI Chairman also spoke about the need and benefits of privatisation of airports stating that it helps reduce the cost of AAI. He stated the process of privatisation helped to get revenues from the airports without deploying manpower which in turn turned the AAI's funds towards unserved areas. Last year, the AAI recommended the Centre to privatise six more airports -- Amritsar, Varanasi, Bhubaneswar, Indore, Raipur and Trichy. 

(With ANI inputs)

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