DIAL: Aggressive renovation deadlines cause of inconvenience at IGI

New Delhi: With passenger inconvenience at the Indira Gandhi International airport becoming a flash point within the central government, as senior members, including the civil aviation minister and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, taking potshots at each other some time back, the airport development company caught in the eye of the storm has now confessed that aggressive deadlines set by them may have been the cause of passenger inconvenience.

For the first time since the public spat between two high profile functionaries of the government, the developer, Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL), currently renovating IGI airport, has admitted that the fault lay with it. It was trying to do the job at a breakneck speed and this put passengers at  considerable inconvenience.

''We learnt a lot with our experience,'' the Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL), chief operating officer, Andrew Harrison, said on Friday. ''Looking back, we would do things differently. Our deadlines were aggressive, which caused a lot of inconvenience to passengers - and our staff, too.'' Harrison was talking to the media after unveiling the renovated IGI international terminal. Work on the terminal was completed 31 June.

Furious passengers had complained that on an average it took them between three and four hours to reach the aircraft after arrival at the airport.

Traffic outside the airport remained as big a mess.

Harrison acknowledged, ''The situation was a little bad for a few months between November (2007) and January. Ideally we should have been renovating only 20 per cent of the operational space, but with our deadlines we were working on 35 per cent of the operational space.''

This, he said, was the ''reason for all the trouble''.

DIAL was initially supposed to wrap up renovation work by March 30 this year, but it sought more time from the civil aviation ministry to reduce the chaos.