Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lay a foundation stone for the Rs 16,000 crore Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) on February 18.
As part of his day-long visit to Mumbai on Sunday next, Modi will also inaugurate the Magnetic Maharashtra investor summit at Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC).
The Prime Minister will kick-start the work on the development of the second international airport in and around Mumbai comes three and a half months after the Maharashtra Government gave a go-ahead to the GVK-Mumbai International Airport ltd (MIAl) combine for the development of NMIA.
Though the nodal agency for the development of NMIA —City & Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) – has all along been insisting that the new airport would be operational by 2019, Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha said early this month that he expected the proposed airport to become functional by 2021.
Under the Concession Agreement signed on January 8, a special purpose vehicle has been set up to execute the ambitious airport project. Though its subsidiary MIAl, the GVK Power & Infrastructure ltd. (GVKPIl) holds 74 per cent equity, while the CIDCO will have the remaining 26 per cent stake in the project.
The initial concession period is 30 years from the appointed date, which is extendable by another 10 years, for the project in which GVKPIl was declared the successful bidder in February 2017.
The GVKPIl, which currently operates India’s first brown-field and green-field airports — Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA), Mumbai and Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru respectively under the PPP model, and the GVK-led MIAl had pipped Messrs GMR Airports limited in the post in the final bids on February 13, 2017.
The NMIA, which is coming up in the neighbouring Raigad district, is not only expected to change the face of Navi Mumbai, but it will also support the rapidly growing air travel needs of the people in Mumbai Metropolitan Region, where there is already busy CSIA. To be located in an area of 1140 hectares, the proposed airport will accommodate two parallel runways for independent parallel operation with provision of full length taxi ways on either side of the runways.