AAI expects user fees to up its annual earnings by Rs 100 cr

The Airports Authority of India (AAI) expects its annual earnings to grow by Rs 100 crore once it receives approval from the Ministry of Civil Aviation to charge user development fee (UDF) at nine airports. “We will annually earn around Rs 100 crore by charging UDF at eight of our airports. We have sent our request and will start charging as soon as we receive the approval,” said a senior AAI official who did not wish to be named.

UDF is levied on passengers to recover the money invested on building the airport.

In a first, the airports authority is to start charging UDF of Rs 1,000 on each international and Rs 150 on each domestic passenger at the Jaipur airport from January 1.

For the remaining eight airports — Udaipur, Amritsar, Mangalore, Varanasi, Vishakhapatnam, Trichy, Ahmedabad and Thiruvananthapuram, the authority proposes to charge Rs 250 on each domestic and Rs 900 for each international passenger. “We have invested a lot of money in upgrading these airports and work at these airports is over,” said the official.

AAI invested Rs 2,547.57 crore on modernising airport terminals, passenger facilities and air traffic and navigational aids during 2008-09, which is the highest capital expenditure incurred so far by the authority. It earned a profit of Rs 687.21 crore on revenue of Rs 4,185.95 crore during the same period.

Any proposal to charge UDF at airports with passenger numbers of over 1.2 million goes to the Airport Economic Regulatory Authority and below that comes to the ministry.

As of now, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore, major stake holders being private players and AAI a part of the consortium, charge such development fee. The Delhi International Airport Ltd, consortium which operates the Delhi airport, charges airport development fee of Rs 1,300 from each international and Rs 200 from each domestic passenger.

These private airports also have applied for increasing the development fees at airports.

AAI has completed development work at 35 non-metro airports in the country. The authority is also taking up the city-side development of Kolkata, Hyderabad (Begumpet), Visakhapatnam, Bhubaneswar, Lucknow, Indore, Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Guwahati and Jaipur airports through public-private partnership.