Airport delays - Politics at play ?

Recently India has got two world class airports to completion, the GMR Hyderabad Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (GHIAL) in Hyderabad and the Bengaluru Inernational Airport (BIAL) in Bangalore. Two great examples of efficient project execution that completed on time - something that's not so common in India. They are just waiting for the go ahead from the civil aviation ministry for commencing the commericial operations. All these days we've been badly wanting such facilities and now when the aiports are ready, we don't allow them to operate!! Where else this can happen?

I don't understand why the local papers and the public figures just woke up and requesting for the continuation of the existing airports. What they have been doing all these days? Well.. I agree, the connectivity is an issue. Was it not visible when the project was conceived? No body in India's silicon valley and the other major IT hub thought about the commuter problems then? This is a classic example of the short sightedness of the Indian politicians. I would spare the "leaders" in Bangalore as they were quite busy in staging their political stunts and back stabbing and so on. After all, they were never used to think of a solution until things go out of control completely which is evident on the Bangalore roads. At least the AP government could have done something. On March 15th Soniaji came and threw open the Hyderabad airport with much fan fare and on the same day the aviation ministry has asked GHIAL to postpone the commercial operations for a "few" days, quoting the reason that the airlines need some more time to shift their operations. Is that the ground reality? Similarly the Bangalore airport launch has been postponed until May 10th. I wonder if the high speed express ways and the rail connections can be completed by that time. It is evident that they don't want to trouble the Bangaloreans at least until the elections. After all we citizens have a quite short memory that the politicians are exploiting for decades.

Out of the blues, there is one encouraging (for the airport operators) news from the ministry that the contract would not be breached. I myself won't prefer to travel 2.5 hrs to reach the airport to take a 2 hrs flight. Keeping the city airports open for the short haul flights until the connectivity issues are sorted out is not a bad idea. But the airport operators need to be compensated for the loss of their revenue from all fronts. And more importantly work on a war footage to connect these airports to the people!! Otherwise we'll be inviting a lot of trouble to the success of the Public Private Partnership model.