Around 25 Airports Authority of India (AAI) airports have been earmarked by the Centre for asset monetisation over the next three years under the National Monetization Pipeline (NMP).
These airports include Bhubaneshwar, Varanasi, Amritsar, Trichy, Indore, Raipur, Calicut, Coimbatore, Nagpur, Patna, Madurai, Surat, Ranchi, Jodhpur, Chennai, Vijayawada, Vadodara, Bhopal, Tirupati, Hubli, Imphal, Agartala, Udaipur, Dehradun and Rajahmundry.
Minister of State for Civil Aviation General Dr VK Singh announced this in Lok Sabha on Thursday in a written reply after Member of Parliament Mimi Chakraborty asked whether the government proposes to privatise another 30-35 airports of the country in the next five years.
Singh said that the criteria adopted for the monetisation of airport assets under the NMP are for airports having annual traffic above the threshold of 0.4 million passengers (in FY 2019 and 2020) and also airports with a sizeable ongoing or proposed capital expenditure plan as per the National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP).
In August this year, the Centre said it was planning to raise approximately Rs 20,782 crore till FY25 by monetising airports across the country.
Except for four airports out of 137 airports in the country, all continue to suffer losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the financial year 2020-21. These four are Kandala (0.11 crore), Kanpur Chakeri (6.07 crore), Bareilly (0.68 crores) and Porbandar (1.54 crores).
“Delhi and Mumbai airports suffered a huge loss of Rs 317 crore and Rs 331 crore respectively. Except for the few airports like Goa that has made a profit of Rs 146 crore in FY 2019-20 has suffered a huge loss of Rs 118 crore in FY 2020-21, most of the airports continued to suffer losses in the last three financial years,” Singh added.
AAI owns 136 airports, out of which AAI has formed Joint Venture in seven. AAI has recently awarded six airports namely Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram, Mangaluru for Operations, Management and Development under Public-Private Partnership (PPP) for a period of 50 years.
