The largest infrastructure development project in India post independence, the Delhi International Airport, witnessed a growth of 7.3 per cent in traffic over the previous year. The airport handled a total of 36.7 million passengers in 2013. The airport’s terminals collectively boast of a total capacity of a whopping 62 million passengers annually, including the 34 million passengers that the state-of-the-art T3 caters to individually.
“We credit this boost to our airline partners. Domestic carriers have added several new routes and accentuated frequencies on existing metro and non-metro routes. Existing international carriers have also increased frequencies. Besides, we had new carriers starting up service as well from Delhi,” said I Prabhakara Rao, CEO, Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL).
Several new international airlines, such as Mihin Lanka and Kyrgyz Air among others, have added Delhi in their network. Melbourne, Sydney and Birmingham, are some of the new points now connected to Delhi. Besides, a host of new domestic routes have also been added, including flights to Imphal, Trivandrum, Khajuraho, Dibrugarh and Varanasi.
Rao stated that the Indian aviation sector is growing steadily, and passenger output has grown from 73 million in 2006 to 150 million in 2013. By 2020, it is predicted that traffic at Indian airports is expected to touch 450 million passengers.
The establishment of Air Asia India and Tata SIA; the Jet Etihad partnership; the interline agreement between Tigerair and SpiceJet; the establishment of India’s largest pilot training facility; and the future privatisation of tier II Indian airports, are some of the developments he highlighted from the previous year.
DIAL is a Joint Venture Consortium led by GMR, with a 54 per cent stake. Other equity partners include Airports Authority of India (26 per cent), Fraport (10 per cent) and Malaysian Airport Holding Berhard (10 per cent).
