By Brij Khandelwal, IANS
Agra : From a city that is home to the Taj Mahal and gets around 12,000 tourists a day comes the growing demand for an international airport. Tourism industry leaders, in fact, are crying foul that such a facility is coming up in the relatively unknown area of Jewar nearby.
They say for one reason or the other, political decision makers have been ignoring or deliberately shelving Agra’s claim for an international airport.
The Indian government last year cleared the Taj international airport project at Jewar in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh, midway between Greater Noida and Agra.
“But this will serve little practical purpose,” says Rakesh Chauhan, president of the Hotels and Restaurants Association of Agra.
“It will only go against the interests of the Indira Gandhi International Airport which is in an expanding mode at the moment. The Delhi airport will run into a huge financial deficit as a result of the diversion of traffic. Just 68 km from Palam, another airport makes no sense,” Chauhan added.
Those in the aviation business say any new airport should be at least 150 km away from the existing airport.
This makes Agra the ideal venue for an airport that can handle international air traffic, says exporter Har Vijay Singh Bahia, who is a frequent globetrotter.
Foreign tourists are astonished that Agra doesn’t have flights.
“The star tourist centre of India needs a civil airport urgently. They can begin with allowing domestic flights. Already, chartered flights are landing daily,” said a local tourism industry leader.
Retired air force officials settled here say Agra’s Kheria Air Force airport at present is not being used to its full capacity as the fighter planes have left for Gwalior.
Paratrooper training and aerial delivery plus transport activities are being conducted there. After the 1971 war only on half a dozen occasions has the airfield been used to lift paratroopers or supplies to distant places, including the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Kargil.
The number of planes at Kheria has been drastically reduced, they say.
Against this scenario, there seems to be logic in the demand to bifurcate the airport, allocating one airstrip to a civil airport to handle tourist traffic.
“First there were rumours that the defence ministry had objected to an international airport in Agra. Later, it was said the airport would not be viable in terms of revenue generation. Then we suddenly heard that the project had gone to Jewar on the advice of Bahenji (Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati),” fumes Surendra Sharma, founder president of the Hotels and Restaurants Association of Agra.
“If all tourists have to eventually come to Agra to see the Taj then what sense does it make to ask them to get down at Palam or Jewar and then take the road to Agra, which is not only time consuming but has also proved quite unsafe in recent years.”
Private airlines want to start flights from Agra to all major centres, including Delhi, Goa, Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata.
“The infrastructure is already there in Agra. I don’t know what’s the big hassle. Obviously there are lobbies at work against Agra’s interests,” says Abhinav Jain, a leading handicrafts and marble exporter of the city.
“The only hitch is that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati wants to develop her own area through a big project like the Taj international hub at Jewar,” says a Samajwadi Party leader.
But a ray of hope has come from officials of the Delhi airport authorities who do not want another airport so close to the Indira Gandhi International Airport.
“With Agra, they have no problem,” a source said, because Agra is more than 200 km away from Palam.
Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL) is developing a new terminal, T3, a runway and taxiway – with an estimated investment of Rs.300 billion (approx $7.6 billion) in three phases. The new terminal is expected to cater to nearly 100 million passengers by 2030 against a current flow of around 20.4 million passengers.
DIAL’s chief executive officer Andrew Harrison said the timing of a new airport in Jewar, close to greater Noida, was inappropriate.
“Globally, a second airport in such close proximity comes up only when the first one is saturated. Otherwise, a second airport leads to two weak airports as well as huge additional costs in infrastructure development,” Harrison told reporters.