Maharashtra: Government plans to operationalise Shirdi airport by October

The state government is planning to operationalise the Greenfield Shirdi airport by October this year. 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 work including getting the aerodrome license from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) soon. Once this license is secured, we hope to start operations 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 a 350 hectare area, has a runway with a 2,500 meter running length. Its operationalisation is expected to boost religious tourism to the temple town which sees massive footfalls of the 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. This includes expansion of the runway to 3,200 meters, expanding the capacity of the terminal building to handle 300 passengers per hour, baggage scanner machine, ATC tower, fire-fighting 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 at Solapur and instead focus on using the existing 1,800 meter 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 meters from the existing 1,400 meters 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, namely those at Mumbai, Nagpur, Aurangabad and Nagpur are commercially operational. Presently, these smaller airports lacked scheduled flights and catered to only smaller aircrafts. The Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport will reach its saturation point in a few years even as work on the proposed Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) is yet to begin.