Navi Mumbai intl' airport: Permission to be sought this week for proceeding on bids

Necessitates after MHA rejected security clearance to Hiranandani-Zurich airport consortium

Maharashtra government’s City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco) will be asking this week to be allowed to move on with the process of getting bids for the proposed Navi Mumbai international airport.

Cidco’s aim is to get the Request for proposals (RFPs) out by early March and the final contract issued by June. Four bidders had qualified but one of these, the consortium of the Hiranandani Group and Zurich Airport, was denied security clearance to proceed by the Union home ministry (first reported in Business Standard).

That leaves the GMR group, the GVK group’s Mumbai International Airport, and the Tata Realty-MIA Infrastructure consortium.

Cidco, nodal agency for the airport project, will be asking the Maharashtra chief secretary-led project monitoring and implementation committee (PMIC) for approval to proceed with the issue of a formal RFP to the bidders.

Sanjay Bhatia, vice-chairman and managing director of Cidco, told Business Standard: “We’ll seek PMIC approval and then the state Cabinet’s clearance will be sought. We expect to issue the RFP to the three qualified bidders by the first week of March.”

The Union aviation ministry, he said, had already given its go-ahead.

The ministry has said the airport will be developed as a joint venture between Cidco and the private developer. The Airports Authority of India will have an option to hold five per cent stake in the project. Bhatia also said technical bids for pre-airport development were under scrutiny and the financial bids of the qualified parties would soon be opened.

The state government and Cidco hope, as mentioned earlier, to award the contract by June.

The objective is to get the first phase with passenger handling capacity of 10 million to be commissioned by December 2019.