Delhi, Mumbai airports upgradation in a mess

It has now been almost 21 months since the two consortia — Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL) and Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) — have been working on the grandiose projects of renovating and upgrading the busiest airports of India. But even after such a considerable time lag, both the airports are a pale figure of what was envisioned. The shanties surrounding the Mumbai airport still make an indelible impression of nothing has changed and the chaos at the Delhi airport is a stark reminder of the bygone era. Clearly, both the companies have failed miserably in addressing the basic problems of adequate parking, lounge facilities and check-in counters.
In fact, with such a crippling state of infrastructure and a boom in the aviation industry, it doesn’t comes as a surprise that flights between Delhi and Mumbai, which used to take 95 minutes before 2003, now take at least two hours. Aviation experts believe that the biggest problem with both the airports is that they are brown field projects.
When the construction activities end in 2010, both the airports may not be a shade of what was earlier promised to be replicas of Shanghai and JFK airports.
In fact, the customer satisfaction index unfolds the real story.This indicator doesn’t come as a surprise, knowing that the Delhi and Mumbai airport are the world’s worst airports when it comes to arrivals. What’s more, according to recent survey in Forbes magazine, these two are world’s worst for timely arrivals.
27/01/08 Dheeraj Tiwari & Raja Awasthi/Economic Times

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Categories: Airports Jan 2008