Nine months it won the final bid, the GVK-led Mumbai International Airport ltd (MIAl) was on Tuesday formally given a go-ahead by the Maharashtra Government to begin work on the development of the Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA).
At its weekly meeting presided over by chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, the Maharashtra Cabinet decided to award the NMIA work contract to Messrs MIAl. To be developed at an estimated cost of Rs 16,000 crore, the NMIA is expected to be operational by December 2019. The City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO) is the nodal agency for the implementation the green field airport project.
On February 13 this year, the GVK-MIAl combine had emerged as the best bidder to develop the NMIA. The GVK, which currently operates India's first brownfield and greenfield airports — Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport and Mumbai and Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru respectively under the PPP model, and the MIAl had pipped Messrs GMR Airports limited in the post in the final bids. PNS
The GVK, which currently manages the Mumbai International Airport ltd, had offered 12.60 per cent share of the annual gross revenue of the project, as against 10.44 percentage of revenue share offered by GMR Delhi.
At the RFQ Stage, GMR, MIAl (GVK), Tata Realty-MIA Infrastructure and Zurich Airport-Hiranandani Group had been qualified for participating in the financial bidding process of Navi Mumbai International Airport. Out of which two companies i.e. GMR & MIAl (GVK) had submitted their financial bids.
The Rs 16,000-crore NMIA - to be located in adjoining 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.
The NMIA is expected to absorb annually 10 million passengers in its first operational year, doubling to 20 million by 2020 followed by 30 million passengers in 2025 and ultimately 40 million by 2030.
The importance of NMIA should be realized from the fact that the Mumbai airport currently handles 26 million passengers annually and the traffic flow has now increased to 45 million passengers and the figure will go up to 119 million by 2031-32.