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

Ashwin Tombat
18 July 2007

Though Bangalore's new international airport will be ready for operations by April 2008, the civic infrastructure to connect it to the city won't, says Ashwin Tombat.

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.