Chennai: The move to privatise the Chennai Airport is gaining momentum with eight private players, including the Tata group, GMR, Adani, GVK and Siemens visiting the Aiport on Wednesday to take stock on the facility.
The site visits were conducted based on requests made to the Airports Authority of India (AAI) in February and were restricted to representatives of those applicants who have purchased the Request for Qualification (RFQ) document.
A pre-application conference was held on February 11, for operation, management and development of Chennai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Jaipur Airports through Public Private Partnership (PPP).
Deepak Shastri, Airport Director at Chennai, confirmed the development stating that there were eight companies visiting the facility on Wednesday. Airport officials showed them around and also had discussions with them on some details.
The RFQ is expected to be opened by mid-March and the details of evaluations done by the players would enter the public domain. The requests are then to be cleared by the government, as per procedure, according to a senior AAI official.
During the visit, Airport officials explained the potential of the Airport, including that of commercialising the land available with the Authority in the facility. According to information available, the PPP model would be executed through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) consisting of the private partner.
It may be noted that Airport employees have been protesting the move to privatise it, after the facility was refurbished with an investment of around Rs 2,015 crore. There were also allegations on the shoddy work in modernisation and upgradation, which has left the facility falling short of international standards.
According to earlier reports, the ministry itself has said that maintenance of the new terminal at Chennai is bad and the work done for upgradation of the airport is patchy and does not meet quality standards set at Delhi or Mumbai.
According to information available with AAI, Chennai airport has seen a 9.4 per cent rise in number of passengers between April and December 2014-15. That’s 10.6 million passengers, domestic and international, as compared to 9.73 million during the same period the previous year.
Aircraft movement, both domestic and international, has declined in December 2014 to 10,104, compared with 10,718 during December 2013.
For the nine-month period ended December 2014, aircraft movement numbers were up 3.2 per cent to 93,148 compared with 90,253 during the same period in 2013.
