Pioneering airport-city project struggles to stay aloft

Kolkata/ Andal (bardhaman): The first ever airport-city project in which Singapore’s Changi airport holds a 26 per cent stake was expected to be the pride of West Bengal. Instead, a steady stream of pitfalls—from land acquisition problems to allegations of corruption amongst promoters—has taken the sheen off the project.
It took only a few clicks of the mouse for developers of India’s first proposed airport- city project to zero in on Andal near the industrial belt of Asansol-Durgapur in West Bengal for the Rs 10,000-crore venture. “I was looking for abandoned airstrips in the region and spotted out the site through Google,” recalls Agarwal, one of the founder promoter’s of Bengal Aerotropolis Projects Limited (BAPL), the special purpose vehicle developing the project.
Executing the project has been a whole different animal. The project, developed in 2006 and in which Singapore’s Changi Airport holds a 26 per cent stake, has been riddled with problems from inception and seems to have a habit of acquiring new ones. First, the project was dogged by an objection by Coal India who said that the plan infringed on valuable coal reserves. Then, there was the state government’s decision to develop another airport about 40 km away at Asansol. Both were not good news for a pioneering project—an airport-city that had an entire ecosystem built into it, from manufacturing units to business and residential complexes. And it’s not every day that you have a marquee name like Singapore’s airport authority interested in a project in India—that too in a state famous for agitations against industry.
10/02/11 Probal Basak /Business Standard

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Categories: airports Jan 2012, New Jan 2012