By Raju Vernekar
Mumbai, Aug 20:
In continuation of its disinvestment policy, the Central Government has decided to lease out Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram airports of Airports Authority of India (AAI) to private parties under Public-Private Partnership (PPP).
After privatisation of Bank of Punjab and Sindh Bank, Bank of Maharashtra (Mahabank), UCO Bank and IDBI Bank, this is the major decision of the Government to privatise these three airports. The union cabinet finalised this arrangement on Wednesday.
After the cabinet meeting, Union Minister Prakash Javdekar on Wednesday announced in the press conference, that three airports of AAA will be leased through PPP. The Government plans to generate Rs.1070 crore by this PPP for 50 years. The AAI intends using this revenue to set up airports in smaller cities and towns. The AAI will take over these airports after 50 years.
The decision to privatise the airports in several cities including Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Mangaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, and Guwahati was taken in 2018. Adani Enterprises had won the rights to run these airports after a competitive bidding process in February 2019. The company signed the concessionaire agreement with the AAI for three airports -Ahmedabad, Mangaluru and Lucknow on February 14, 2020. It is yet to sign the concessionaire agreement for Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram airports.
The AAI, which works under the Ministry of Civil Aviation, owns and manages over 100 airports across the country. Last year in September, the AAI had recommended to the Union Civil Aviation Ministry to privatise also the airports in Amritsar, Varanasi, Bhubaneswar, Indore, Raipur and Trichy.
While the PPP experiments have helped create world-class airports and helped in the delivery of efficient and quality services to the airport passengers, it has also helped AAI in enhancing its revenues and focusing on developing airports and Air Navigation infrastructure in the rest of the country.
Revenue received by AAI from PPP partners has enabled AAI to create infrastructure facilities in Tier-II and Tier-III cities and also to upgrade their airports to international standards. The PPP airports in India are consistently ranked among the top 5 in their respective categories by the Airports Council International (ACI) in terms of Airport Service Quality (ASQ).
Therefore, the government decided to lease out more airports of AAI for Operation, Management and Development under guidance of the PPP Appraisal Committee (PPPAC). The government has also constituted an Empowered Group of Secretaries (EGoS) to decide on any issue falling beyond the scope of PPPAC.
After the PPPAC approved the transaction documents, the entire bidding process was carried out under the supervision and directions of the Empowered Group of Secretaries (EGoS) which comprised of representatives of NITI Aayog, Department of Expenditure and Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) of Ministry of Finance (MoF).
The government had leased out the Airports Authority of India’s airports at Delhi and Mumbai on Public-Private Partnership for Operation, Management and Development about a decade ago.
