Bangalore International Airport right on schedule, but what about infrastructure?
18 July 2007

India's silicon city Bangalore will have a brand new international airport by April next year, the Swiss CEO of Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL) Albert Brunner has announced, saying that the project is already '77 per cent complete' and should be able to throw open its doors on the projected date of opening.

The roof, front and back glass façade and walls of the terminal building are complete, while seven of the eight fixed link bridges connecting the terminal to the apron are in place. Fourteen escalators have been installed.

The four-km runway is nearing completion and the taxiway is '98 per cent complete', Brunner says. Still in progress is the fabrication of the top dome of the control tower. The airport will have a rainwater harvesting system covering 1,680 acres, a sewage treatment plant and a tertiary treatment plant to reuse the water. It is designed to handle eight million passengers in its first year of operations starting 2 April 2008, a date the chief executive officer is determined to keep.

Dream come true
If he succeeds, it will be a fairytale ending for a project conceived in 1991, on which construction began only 14 years later after it was awarded in July 2005 to a consortium including Unique Zurich Airport of Switzerland, Siemens of Germany, and Larsen and Toubro of India. Expected to cost $500 million, it has been designed for 11 million passengers a year, up from the 5 million first planned, as traffic growth to the hi-tech city has skyrocketed with its flourishing economy. Union civil aviation minister Praful Patel, after his recent visit to Devanahalli, was satisfied with the airport's aesthetics and progress, Brunner says.

Six thousand employees are working round the clock seven days a week to ensure the deadline is met in a country where large projects routinely go into time overruns by years, sometimes even decades. A fuel depot and cargo-handling complex are being built at an additional cost of $173 million. The concessionaires — Indian Oil and Skytanking for aviation fuel, and GlobeGround India and Air India plus Singapore Airport Terminal Services for ground handling — will pay for this.

Other major concessionaires include LSG Sky Chefs and Taj SATS, which will compete for the food and beverage business. All concessionaires have been selected, and "we want to make sure there's competition", says Brunner, who has been living away from his wife and 14-year-old son, who have stayed back in Switzerland while he executes the project. He expects to apply for a license by the end of September and start trials of systems the following month.

Expansion plans
Business prospects are so good that the new airport at Devanahalli, 35 km from Bangalore city, will have to build a second runway as early as 2014, to boost its capacity. This will enhance BIAL's capacity to about 40 million passengers a year. The present runway could easily meet the requirements for the first two years, handling about 17 million passengers a year.

But what could throw the proverbial spanner into the rapidly ongoing work is Bangalore's appalling infrastructure. A six-lane highway is being constructed, which will pass close to the airport, but both the state government and the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) are unwilling to build the trumpet flyover connecting it to the airport approach road.

Speed bumps ahead
BIAL has assigned L&T to complete the project at a cost of Rs117 crore, but acquisition of the land for one road over bridge has run into trouble, with the landowner going to court. Only two road over bridge loops would be ready by April 2008, Brunner said. So, when the airport opens, people will have to travel an extra five to six kilometers in Bangalore's bumper-to-bumper, world-class traffic jams.

Brunner says that what the airport really needs is a rail-link and a second highway. However, the closest railhead is seven kilometres from the airport exit. So, BIAL is negotiating with bus companies to run shuttle services to the city, and is close to signing a deal for taxi services.

Even if the infrastructure problems are overcome, there is a growing lobby for retaining the present HAL airport at Bangalore, especially from the low cost airlines. The question is whether BIAL will allow the second airport to function. Brunner does not see any need for two airports in a city like Bangalore. Campaigning to retain the HAL airport was expected, he says: "It is a worldwide phenomenon whenever a new airport comes up." he told journalists.

At present, though, the man from a nation that takes pride in its clocks and watches is racing against time to get his showpiece airport up and running. "We try hard to keep our reputation as timekeepers of the world," he says.

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