The Delhi airport will spend ₹9,800 crore for capex till June 2022 including building the fourth runway, expanding parking stands for aircraft to 82 from the current 55 and increasing the airport’s handling capacity to 140 million passengers annually.

“We have already gone into international bonds,” I Prabhakara Rao, Deputy Managing Director, GMR Group, said at a press conference here on Monday when asked about the source of funds.

At the moment, it is not clear as to how the airport, which is the busiest in the country, will recover the money. Rao declined to get into the details saying just that ‘the funding was clear’. Earlier, the airport had imposed an arrival and departure tax on passengers to recover its investments.

The Delhi airport is run by the Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL), which is a consortium of the GMR Group, the Airports Authority of India and Franport. The consortium has the mandate to finance, design, build, operate and maintain the airport for 30 years with an option to extend it by a further 30 years.

In the proposed new plan, the entire T1 apron will be demolished and a new and expanded structure constructed to provide for 82 aircraft stands. The progressive completion of the T1 apron will be from July 2020 to June 2022. Besides, the arrival and departure terminal in T1 will be integrated under one roof.

Plans are also afoot to build a flyover at the aerocity metro station junction to reduce the travel time between Terminal 1 and Terminal 3.

L&T has been entrusted with the entire EPC work in the latest phase of development and work has already started.

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