Not a single brick has been laid but the proposed Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) cost is already touching stratosphere.
The airport is now estimated to cost Rs 16,704 crore, a whopping 250% increase over the Rs 4,766 crore in 2006-07 when the plan was first formulated, according to the projections of the Union civil aviation ministry. The rise is primarily on account of land acquisition costs.
The projected cost was revealed by Minister of State for Civil Aviation Shri Jayant Sinha as part of a reply to a question in Rajya Sabha, wherein he stated that the government has given 'in-principle' permission to 18 greenfield airports in the country.
The need for a greenfield airport has become pressing as the passenger numbers at the Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) have already overshot estimates.
But the work on Navi Mumbai airport is moving at snail's pace.
Till recently, the Maharashtra government's deadline of the first flight from the Navi Mumbai airport was December 2017, which was pushed to 2019 and is likely to postponed.
Union civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapati Raju Pusapati had told DNA Money last month that "Except for the few permissions from different departments, not much has moved at the airport. I have twice done aerial surveys of the place, but things are still the same. Nothing has moved forward."
The land acquisition issue has been the major hurdle which has delayed the project all through these years, he had said.
The state-run City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco), the nodal agency for the project, has extended the date for submission of request for proposal (RFP) to January 9 from November 7.
This was done to facilitate Hiranandani Developers and Zurich Airport which are together bidding for the project, to submit their RPF. Hiranandani-Zurich consortium was denied permission to bid earlier by the government on security grounds. The security clearance was given by Ministry of Home Affairs this year.
MIAL which operates Mumbai airport, MIA Infrastructure of France and Tata Realty have also bid for the RFP. MIAL has the first right of refusal to the project.
"The airport infrastructure has already begun creaking under the strain and will be unable to cope with the increasing pressure of passenger volume growth," MIAL, the airport operator, said in its latest sustainability report a few months back.
At CSIA, the passenger numbers hit 41.67 million in 2015-2016 against a 35 million projection by the airport operator. It had estimated 40 million passenger traffic only by 2018-19.
