Friday, February 02, 2018

Twin engines UDAN, NABH Nirman to power India’s aviation growth story

New Delhi: With more and more Indians taking to the skies, the government appears determined to ensure that the growth story of India’s aviation sector continues unhindered.

In a big push towards the fulfillment of the stated objective, the government plans to expand airport capacity more than five times to handle one billion trips a year.

Delivering his budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said, “Regional connectivity scheme of UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik) initiated by the government last year shall connect 56 unserved airports and 31 unserved helipads across the country. Operations have already started at 16 such airports. We propose to expand our airport capacity more than five times to handle a billion trips a year under a new initiative - NABH Nirman. The balance sheet of AAI shall be leveraged to raise more resources for funding this expansion.”

“In the last three years, the domestic air passenger traffic grew at 18% per annum and our airline companies placed orders for more than 900 aircrafts,” he added.

The budget has also proposed an increased budgetary allocation of Rs 6,602.86 crore in the next financial year for the civil aviation ministry. The allocation is nearly three times higher than the amount of Rs 2710 crore allocated to the ministry for the current fiscal.

Interestingly, out of the total amount, Rs 4,469.50 crore would be for the purchase of two new aircraft -- Boeing 777-300 ER -- for special extra section flight operations (VVIP operations).
01/02/18 ET Now
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