New Delhi: The Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the proposal for leasing out Guwahati airport through public-private partnership (PPP). Jaipur and Thiruvananthapuram are the other two airports approved to be leased out under this deal.
Addressing the press, Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said the Cabinet has approved the proposal for leasing out Jaipur, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram airports through the PPP model. Currently, the airports are owned and managed by the government-run Airports Authority of India (AAI).
Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri had on Tuesday said that the Ministry of Civil Aviation would place a proposal for the “privatization” of airports before the Union Cabinet.
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.
While these 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 enabled AAI to create infrastructure facilities in Tier-2 and Tier-3 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 PPP through the Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee (PPPAC). The government also constituted an Empowered Group of Secretaries (EGoS) to decide on any issue falling beyond the scope of PPPAC.
PPPAC approved the transaction documents. The entire bidding process was carried out under the supervision and directions of EGoS which comprised representatives of NITI Aayog, Department of Expenditure, and Department of Economic Affairs (DEA) of Ministry of Finance (MoF).
Adani Enterprises had won the rights to run six airports — Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Mangaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, and Guwahati airport — through the PPP model after a competitive bidding process last February.