New airport won’t serve the needs: Report

The new airport at Navi Mumbai, backed by Civil Aviation minister Praful Patel, will be saturated in 25 years.

Updated on: Oct 6, 2010, 01:51:43 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The new airport at Navi Mumbai, backed by Civil Aviation minister Praful Patel, will be saturated in 25 years.

This is what a report submitted by a Mumbai-based think tank to the Jairam Ramesh-headed environment and forest ministry, said.

The Observer Research Foundation of Mumbai in its report on the second airport says the proposed airport at Panvel will be saturated in about 25 years after it starts operations and by then there may be no land available in Mumbai for a third airport.

“To continue to operate two airports well beyond saturation point would be an invitation to disaster,” said Hormuz P Mama, an aviation expert, who authored the report.

The report will be examined at the next meeting of the Expert Appraisal Committee that is examining the proposal for the second airport.

The total land available for the new airport is 1.140 hectares. The airport will have an ultimate capacity of 50 million passengers a year. “It will be only half of the ultimate capacity of several competing airports around India,” Mama said.

The Delhi international will finally have a capacity of 100 million passengers a year.

While the report highlights aviation concerns, the environment ministry has blocked the proposal on environmental grounds. “An airport at Panvel has almost everything against it,” the report said, while suggesting that the site at Mandwa-Rewas is better equipped to handle a bigger airport.

The report said Tata Consultancy Services had recommended the Mandwa-Rewas site to City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco) in 1970. The 45-sq-km site can accommodate four runaways, the report said. “It would have been one of the largest airports in Asia with an ultimate capacity of well over 100 million passengers a year,” the report said. While Cidco had negated the site for high cost, saying one-third of the land required will have to be reclaimed, Mama said it will be a cheaper alternative to Navi Mumbai.

The report said the distance of 115 km from south Mumbai to the airport, which has been a concern, can be reduced to 20 km by constructing an over-water bridge. “The [Mandwa-Rewas] site offers clear flight paths, little urban growth and no hill or other obstacles,” the report said. The environment ministry has already sought environment impact assessment reports for the alternative sites. Cidco is yet to submit the reports.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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