Policy soon on building low-cost airports

Having identified 50 non-metro cities and remote locations across the country for building low-cost airports, the Centre is shortly coming up with a policy on the matter in which state governments would have a major role to play.
The Civil Aviation Ministry would soon finalise names of the first five of these 50 no-frill airports to be taken up first, official sources said here today.
The policy, which is being given final shape by the Ministry, is likely to put the onus of providing land, water and electricity free of charge to these airports on state governments, which would also have to grant tax concessions or exemptions for these projects.

It comes in the wake of the BJP-led government's announcements that these airports would be built on a private -public partnership (PPP) model to provide air connectivity to non-metro cities and those in remote areas.
Apart from the facilities to be granted by state governments to these airports, the government would grant concessions to airlines operating there, such as exemption from paying landing, parking, navigation, night parking and fuel throughput charges, among other things.
In June last year, the UPA-II government, while finalising infrastructure projects for 2013-14, had also decided to build low-cost airports at 51 cities and towns across the country.

Under the decision taken by the Manmohan Singh government, state-owned Airports Authority of India (AAI) was to have set up these airports at towns and cities spread across Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan and Maharashtra.