25 AAI airports earmarked for asset monetization under NMP in next three years: Centre

As many as 25 Airports Authority of India (AAI) airports have been earmarked for asset monetisation over the years 2022 to 2025 under National Monetization Pipeline (NMP), said Minister of State for Civil Aviation Gen Dr VK Singh in a written reply in Lok Sabha on Thursday.

This comes after Member of Parliament Mimi Chakraborty asked whether the government proposes to privatise another 30-35 airports of the country in the next five years.

These 25 airports include Bhubaneshwar, Varanasi, Amritsar, Trichy, Indore, Raipur, Calicut, Coimbatore, Nagpur, Patna, Madurai, Surat, Ranchi, Jodhpur, Chennai, Vijayawada, Vadodara, Bhopal, Tirupati, Hubli, Imphal, Agartala, Udaipur, Dehradun and Rajahmundry.

Singh said that the criteria adopted for the monetisation of airport assets under the NMP are for airports having annual traffic above the threshold of 0.4 million passengers (in FY 2019 and 2020) and airports with a sizeable ongoing or proposed capital expenditure plan as per the National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP).

Except for four airports out of 137 airports in the country, all continue to suffer losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the financial year 2020-21, Singh replied when asked about the profit or loss made by 136 AAI airports during the last three financial years.

In a written reply, Singh said that except Kandala (0.11 crore), Kanpur Chakeri (6.07 crore), Bareilly (0.68 crores) and Porbandar (1.54 crores) all other airports suffered huge losses.

"Delhi and Mumbai airports suffered a huge loss of Rs 317 crore and Rs 331 crore respectively. Except for the few airports like Goa that has made a profit of Rs 146 crore in FY 2019-20 has suffered a huge loss of Rs 118 crore in FY 2020-21, most of the airports continued to suffer losses in the last three financial years," Singh added.

Further, Chakraborty also asked for the details of the total number of airports in the country and the percentage stake owned by AAI in each of these till November 2021.

"AAI owns 136 airports in the country out of which, AAI has formed Joint Venture in seven airports. AAI has recently awarded six airports namely Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram, Mangaluru for Operations, Management and Development under Public-Private Partnership (PPP) for a period of 50 years," he replied.

( With inputs from ANI )