Sindhu Bhattacharya

New Delhi: The Navi Mumbai airport project would miss its 2012 deadline unless the various ministries involved in getting it off the ground come to an agreement soon.

This deadline is important since the present airport would have reached its peak passenger handling capacity of 40 million by that year.

No wonder then that the civil aviation ministry and even Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh have sought help from the Prime Minister’s Office in expediting the beginning of this project.

The project is stuck because the ministry of environment and forests has not cleared the 2,750 acres of land earmarked for the airport, citing Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) concerns for the last five months.

When asked about the delay in this project, civil aviation secretary Ashok Chawla said that “if the issue gets resolved in a month, the project will still meet its deadline but if it goes beyond, there will be a longer spin……we cannot choose another site for the proposed airport, even tweaking 100-200 acres from the site is not possible”.

Senior civil aviation ministry officials assert that the environment ministry has “ignored recommendations of the National Coastal Zone Management Authority to clear the project site despite issues related to CRZ….in a meeting with CIDCO officials in November, the environment ministry had agreed, in principle, to amend the CRZ 1 provision. But five months after the assurance, no permission is in sight.We have no choice but to seek PMO intervention”.

According to a notification by the ministry of environment and Forests, a CRZ is the boundary from the high tide line up to 500 metres in the land-ward side or an area between the low tide line and high tide line. The ministry had earlier ruled out development of the airport on the grounds that 25% of the proposed site falls under CRZ 1 and therefore no commercial development can be allowed there.

The officials said that only the environment ministry’s nod is awaited since all other work on the project is already being completed. An expert panel comprising members of the Central Water and Power Research Institute (CWPRI Pune) and IIT Mumbai is already conducting a technical study so that mitigation measures can be devised for the project. Also, CIDCO is also already in the process of inviting bids for the new airport.

The Navi Mumbai Airport is necessary if Mumbai wants to keep pace with growth in aviation traffic: It is expected to absorb annually 10 million passengers in its first operational year 2012, doubling to 20 million by 2020 and 40 million by 2030.

Like other greenfield airports coming up across the country, the one at Navi Mumbai would also take the public-private partnership route so that CIDCO will ultimately hold only 26% equity in the project.

Source : DNA