BIAL dead serious about April 08 deadline

State not keen on clubbing phases
Work on Devanahalli international airport at frenetic pace
BIAL dead serious about April 08 deadline
Vijay Times News

Bangalore: W ork at the site of the new international airport at Devanahalli is at a feverish-pitch despite views of modifying the project to accommodate future air and passenger traffic projections.

Sixty Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) technical staff guiding about 650 workers, all under the supervision of its Chief Projects Officer Sivaramakrishnan S Iyer, are determined to meet the deadline of April 2, 2008, for the airport to be operational after phase-I.

Says Iyer , "My job is to ensure that an aircraft lands in this airport on April 2, 2008. W e are working towards meeting that deadline by accommodating instructions as and when they come." A Vijay Times visit to the 3,900-acre Devanahalli site revealed that though the construction was in the initial stages, simultaneous activity was on at every branch of civil work, be it for the terminal building, the 18-km boundary wall or the crushed granite needed for the 4-km runway .

Even as the terminal building is coming up on a nine-acre land, the technical building site is being prepared in anticipation of the work.

The Rs 1,411 crore phase-I will accommodate only a third of the terminal building envisaged in the master plan. The construction activity is expected to peak by mid-2006 with at least 6,000 workers slogging it out, said Iyer . The end of phase-I will see a terminal building, a runway , an air traffic control tower , besides the basic infrastructure to make the airport operational by the deadline.

Three hundred acres of land has been set aside for commercial purposes hotels, cafes, business centres, and shopping malls. On completion of phase-III, the airport will have two runways, 120 aircraft stands, two terminal buildings with a capacity to handle four crore passengers and a cargo capacity of 10 lakh tonnes per year .

But the scope of phases II and III has yet to be defined, say BIAL officials.

However , the future projections are seen as a pressure point to redesign the project to a certain extent.

BIAL CEO Albert Brunner told this reporter , "Since the project was designed in 2001, there is a need to redesign the project in view of the latest traffic projections. BIAL is working on a redesign which will be reworked into the project without affecting the airport opening date of April 2, 2008.

( This is a two-part series, whose concluding part will appear tomorrow).

Bangalore: The State Government on Thursday was lukewarm in its response to Union Civil A viation Minister Praful Patel’s insistence to club phase I and II of the international airport at Devanahalli. However , the Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) officials have stated that it can be done if the phases are clearly defined.

Minister for Industries and Infrastructure P G R Scindia on Thursday told Vijay T imes that there was no phase-II at present as the Civil A viation Ministry had not written to the State Government about it. If they write to us about the need to expand the terminal building, we will consider it.

BIAL Chief Projects Officer Sivaramakrishnan S Iyer said that so far , there has been no defined scope for phase-II.