Fixing India's airports

It needs more world-class terminals

A spate of complaints about airports in metropolitan India forced Union Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia to visit Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) in New Delhi on Monday morning. Mr Scindia, accompanied by reporters and press photographers, announced a few minor changes to processes at the airport and also said that problems would be resolved in 10 days. It remains to be seen whether this promise will be followed through as the peak end-year travel season begins. Certainly, given that a large proportion of the plan consists of asking airlines to cancel or move flights, which is hardly a sustainable solution, expectations cannot be set very high.

What is clear is that, in spite of various patchwork attempts to increase airport capacity, the ability of India’s terminals to absorb passenger growth is woefully lacking. Indeed, poor processes, a customer-unfriendly approach, and additional red tape have caused reduced effective airport capacity in recent years. In the last year prior to the pandemic, IGIA operated at its stated capacity of about 69 million passengers annually. The pandemic reduced those numbers to a fraction of their former size, and traffic has not yet fully recovered. And even so, travellers are reporting long queues and missed flights. Clearly, this is not just a problem of hard infrastructure but also of soft infrastructure. There are not enough people, checkpoints are poorly manned, additional chokepoints are being introduced, which retard passenger flow, and so on.

India has a chronic tendency to under-provision its infrastructure and over-regulate what it actually provides. The newly built airport for north Goa at Mopa, for example, is supposed to be able to handle only 4.4 million passengers a year. That is less than the number passing through the seriously overstretched airport at Dabolim currently. Travellers from Mumbai report that security checks in that city’s once enviable airport have become particularly difficult to navigate; and although a new terminal has been inaugurated for Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru, the reality is that wait times in that airport are still high. In Delhi, the regulatory and administrative self-inflicted injuries to airport usability are quite clear. Pointless lines outside the terminal add half an hour to check-in times. The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) has not assigned enough manpower and has inexplicably made the flow of passengers through security checks slower by meddling with the queues. The introduction of private security agencies in addition has merely meant that everyone has one more location to which blame can be assigned.

An emergency meeting chaired by Mr Scindia revealed the number of stakeholders that will have to be chivvied into line if airports are to improve: From immigration officials to the CISF to the airport authority to operators to ground-handling companies to airlines. Soon, Delhi and Mumbai will both be among the 10 busiest airports in the world. Their global peers have half a dozen terminals to aid passenger movements — Delhi has only one world-class terminal, Terminal 3, and that is now more than 10 years old. All metropolitan cities in India should have at least two airports with at least six to seven terminals among them, like their global peers. The long-term plan to make this happen should be put into place now.