Bangalore airport set to fly ahead of Hyderabad

Bangalore airport set to fly ahead of Hyderabad

TIMES NEWS NETWORK


Bangalore: Will the Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) have the last laugh?
The international airport at Devanahalli was to be inaugurated on April 2, 2008. But no longer. It will now be on March 28, 2008. Acutely aware of the neck-and-neck competition with the Hyderabad international airport, also due for opening on April 2, 2008, the BIAL seems to have pipped its neighbour at the finishing post.
BIAL sources confirmed to TOI on Tuesday that the official launch date is March 28. Some 46,000 workers are on the job roundthe-clock to meet the deadline.
Some of the airport’s special features are: a terminal building that lets in so much of natural light that even at 4.30 pm on a cloudy day, no interior lighting is needed. Baggage will be security-checked five times; passengers won’t have to bother about their luggage because after checking it in at the entrance, the baggage will be taken care of till the destination.
Devanahalli will be the first airport in India to have an integrated systems room where baggage handling, apron handling, catering, security, ground handling and immigration will operate together. If any problem arises, coordination will become simpler.
But what is causing concern is the expressway, which is not going to be complete by March 2008. The Karnataka government has requested the Centre to consider viability gap funding (VGF) for the project by considering it as a ‘special case’.
Under the VGF, the Centre can make upfront grant assistance of up to 20 per cent of the total cost of a public-private partnership project. “As the land cost component is not included under VGF, we have requested the Centre to consider the proposed expressway as a special project and include land cost. That way, we can save around Rs 200 crore,’’ public works secretary Sudhir Krishna told TOI. The total cost of the expressway, proposed on the build-operate-transfer basis, is Rs 1,000 crore.
The expressway is one of the strategic roads planned to ensure better connectivity to the airport. It was conceived to augment the proposed high-speed rail link between Bangalore-centre and the airport. However, the expressway failed to take-off on time as it got mired in controversy over road alignment and land acquisition issues.