Private Profit

Saksar Sawasth Aur secular Haryana

POOR PLANNING &

IMPLEMENTATION




Delhi airport epitomises these problems in the case of “upgraded” airports. National newspapers and TV channels have recently been full of horror stories about the conditions obtaining at the now privatised airport in Delhi, owned and run by the Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) of the GMR Group in collaboration with Fraport, owner-manager of Frankfurt airport in Germany.




Before privatisation, Delhi had capacity to handle 12 million passengers per annum (mppa) whereas traffic had doubled between 2003 and 2006 when it had reached 20 million, with 2007 seeing 28 per cent growth. The capacity planned by DIAL during the first phase of upgradation is 33 mppa by March 2010. If current traffic growth rates above 25 percent per year are maintained or exceeded, which is certain, the upgraded airport would already be over-saturated by the time it is commissioned!




GMR-DIAL has been making tall claims about “being ahead of the curve”, claiming they would build capacity of 43 mppa even by 2010. In fact, simple back-of-the-envelope calculations would show that traffic in Delhi is most likely to cross 50 million by then! Indeed, traffic growth projections have been consistently underestimated, the present growth rate for instance being more than double industry forecasts made as late as 2002. Therefore, at each phase of the expansion, as now, GMR-DIAL will be playing catch-up, always a few steps behind actual requirement. There can be little doubt that the new airport, even after it is fully finished, will be plagued by congestion and under-capacity, a far cry from the “world class” paradise promised.




Lack of foresight is also plainly evident in the phase-wise expansion underway. Passengers at the international departure terminal are taking more than four hours in long snaking queues to clear terminal entry, check-in and passport formalities, and numerous passengers are simply missing their flights each day. Bottlenecks have included less than the required number of entry points, check-in counters and even X-ray machines, none of which have been addressed just to save money in the short-term while passengers suffer.




Such capacity shortage and resulting difficulties were precisely the problem earlier too, but the government joining in the chorus of blaming the public sector AAI which was then systematically undermined by being denied funds for upgradation despite repeated requests. Till their shortcomings came to be regular features in the media, GMR-DIAL were proceeding leisurely with scarcely a thought for passenger discomfort. Now, the company has begun to issue daily newspapers advertisements asking for patience while upgradation goes on! No doubt, upgradation is time-consuming and causes some inconvenience, even if temporary, but such a grace period has been denied to AAI by these same private parties, their supporters in government and the globalising classes.




These problems should have been anticipated, as indeed they were by many commentators, and provided for during upgradation as well as in the final plan. But they have not been: poor planning, shabby implementation, and a callous attitude to passengers remain the order of the day.




All the new airports at Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru are grossly under-capacity in terms of all important parameters: runway, aircraft stands, exit gates, aero-bridges, check-in counters. In each case, the ratio of these to passenger traffic is roughly half of what has been provided in the airports run by the collaborating foreign partner in Zurich, Kuala Lumpur or Frankfurt. In each of these, installed capacity is roughly double current traffic: KL, for instance, handles about 25 million passengers with capacity for 50 million. India’s new “world class” airports have barely enough capacity to cope with present traffic.




So where is the much vaunted superior technology and managerial skills that privatisation and foreign collaboration was supposed to bring in? That these are empty promises become even clearer when we look at the greenfield projects where problems of upgrading an existing, functional airport should not arise.




Contd