Sky not the limit for airport privatisation

The airports on give had been Jaipur, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram, Mangaluru, Ahmedabad and Lucknow.

A governing administration-appointed committee has dropped the proposal floated by the civil aviation ministry to limit the range of airports a non-public operator can bid for below the public-non-public partnership design.

Sources in the government explained the committee, just after examining the current market, arrived to the summary that there are not sufficient players in the sector to get up airport privatisation, so placing any form of cap would hold off the entire exercise to privatise airports. The proposal was that a private operator can’t bid for a lot more than two projects in a spherical of auction.

The federal government is likely to invite bids for privatisation of Varanasi, Calicut, Patna, Amritsar, Bhubaneswar, Ranchi, Coimbatore, Trichy, Indore and Raipur airports in the subsequent round and the suggestions when finalised would not have any restrictive clause, sources claimed.

The proposal for placing some form of restriction on selection of jobs a person operator can bid for was mooted last year with Adani Group profitable all 6 projects in the 2019 airport privatisation bids.

The airports on provide ended up Jaipur, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram, Mangaluru, Ahmedabad and Lucknow.

In 2020, the Adani Team emerged as the greatest player in the airports enterprise in conditions of selection of initiatives right after it struck a offer to receive the managing 74% stake in Mumbai Global Airport (Mial) from the GVK Team and other partners.

This advancement experienced more activated the government to glance at putting some sort of restriction on the range of projects a person celebration can bid for. The endeavor was specified to an inter-ministerial committee.

With the GVK offer and the previously award of six airports, the Adani Team would arise as the country’s next-biggest airport operator in phrases of quantity of passengers taken care of following the GMR Group, which operates the Delhi and Hyderabad airports. If Adani’s 7 airports, such as Mumbai Worldwide Airport (Mial), are taken into account, they dealt with a total of 75 million passengers in FY20. GMR’s Delhi and Hyderabad managed 85 million passengers.