Delhi Airport Expansion: The Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport in Delhi, which is now among the 20 busiest airports in the world and is one of the fastest growing major airports over the last four years is all set for a major expansion. Recently, I Prabhakar Rao, Executive Director, GMR Airports stated that the expansion of T1 and T3 terminals will be carried out besides adding new taxiways in the next three years. The airport expansion work will be carried out on both, air as well as terminal sides. Interestingly, a fourth runway will be introduced by 2022, making IGI airport, the first one in the country to come up with four runways. The construction work for this is likely to start from February 2019. Moreover, this move is also likely to increase the capacity from 75 flights to 105 flights an hour.
The expansion of the IGI airport is likely to take place in three phases – first, phase 3A from 2018 to 2021, second, phase 3B from 2021 to 2025 and the third, phase 4 from 2026 onwards. According to the expansion proposal for the airport, the departure terminal 1D and arrival terminal 1C will be combined together and will be expanded to accommodate 40 million passengers per year. Last year, a revamped T2 had been opened to make way for expansion work at T1. Once the expansion of T1 is over, T2 will be demolished in order to make space for world-class T4.
Recently, a senior company executive said that to boost the IGI airport’s capacity to 100 million passengers per annum, Delhi International Airport (DIAL) will invest Rs 9,000 crore by 2022. The Delhi airport, which has a terminal capacity of 75 million passengers per annum, handled 66 million passengers in 2017-2018.
According to the data based from Airports Council International (ACI), the IGI airport’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2017 is 14.3%. It is the highest among airports that are handling minimum 40 million passengers per annum, leaving behind popular airports like Incheon airport in South Korea, Pudong Shanghai airport in China and Dubai airport in UAE.
