Mayday for airports: Urgent need for de-congestion plans to speed up

With rising incomes and falling fares expanding the demand for air travel over the past decade, almost half of India's key airports may be breaching their capacity in FY19

One of the peculiar characteristics of Indian infrastructure planning in general is the systemic inability to estimate future demand or, put another way, plan for growth. The upshot of this failure is that Indians remain chronically short of basic amenities like hospital beds, public education facilities, railway tickets and, these days, even sufficient spectrum to make uninterrupted calls. Nowhere is this weakness more in evidence than in Indian airports, public and private. With rising incomes and falling fares — neither of these being accidental developments — expanding the demand for air travel by several orders of magnitude over the past