Navi Mumbai airport may drill a bigger hole in your pocket

If you were miffed by the high airport development fee charged at the New Delhi airport, here’s another bit of bad news: The user development fee at the proposed Navi Mumbai International Airport is likely to be as high as Rs 4,500 per ticket as delays in execution have inflated the project cost significantly, reports the Economic Times.

The airport, proposed at Ulve in Navi Mumbai, is expected to handle passenger capacity of 25 lakh and reduce the burden on Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, which handles 600 flights everyday.

[caption id=“attachment_579630” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  . The fist phase of the airport was expected to be operational by the end of 2014. Reuters[/caption]

Various experts have already stated time and again that inordinate delays in land acquisition, securing clearances and cost escalations could delay the take-off of the proposed airport by at least two tears. The fist phase of the airport was expected to be operational by the end of 2014.

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The Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) has claimed the delay due to negotiations over the fair market price for the required land for the airport may increase the cost of land acquisition to $1 billion by 2018 , reported DNA in September 2012.

And it is precisely this reason that the project is likely to be operational only by 2017-18 even though the existing airport is touted to reach its optimum capacity of 40 million passengers by 2014.

However, here too the crux of the problem is land and political considerations. Although the project received environmental clearance way back in November 2010, it has been stuck due to land acquisition problems and compensation issues.

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Even the farmers who own the land know real estate here is a gold mine. This is because the locals are certain that portions of the land being acquired under the project will be used for other projects too.

While they stand to lose 450 hectares for the project, they want at least 35-40 percent returned as developed land against the state government’s proposal of 12.5 percent or up to 15 percent developed land, plus monetary compensation of Rs 10 lakh a hectare.

In December Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar had announced that the project affected persons will get four times the compensation that had been offered to them post the approval of the land acquisition bill in the Lok Sabha. However, now that the Bill has been deferred until the Budget Session, Cido, the nodal agency for implementing the project, will get ample time to speed up land acquisition before the bill becomes a law and inflates cost further.

But if the package is still not approved before the Budget Sessions, the rehabilitation cost to Rs 20,000 crore post the Bill’s clearance. According to this Indian Express report, CIDCO needs to shift around 3,000 families from 10 hamlets to acquire 424 hectares. The previous estimates pegged the rehab cost at Rs 1800-2000 crore. The new law is likely to increase it to Rs 20,000 crore .

And naturally, it’s not the state government but the common man who will have to bear this additional burden.

Already the government’s move to charge an Airport Development Fee of Rs 200 for domestic passengers and Rs 1,200 for international ones did not go down well with people in NCR. After major protest, the ADF was halved in both instances rather than scrapped since the developer had overshot the original cost estimates and needed recovery for the gap in funding.

According to the ET report, the Navi Mumbai airport costs have been escalating by around 10 percent every year, which is why bringing down this high UDF of Rs 4,500 will be a tough task for the government.

. The fist phase of the airport was expected to be operational by the end of 2014.