The centre tells high court that having two airports in Bangalore City is not viable. The decision to close the domestic HAL airport was taken because having two operational airports was considered economically not viable. This is a very unfortunate news for everybody living in south Bangalore. The new international airport which will be open from the end of this month is situated in north Bangalore. The biggest reason why everybody wanted HAL airport is that, it takes almost 2-3 hours to come from extreme south Bangalore. Bangalore city has big connectivity issues, too much traffic and very little solution. The metros are under construction, roads are narrow and full of signals, hardly any flyovers or signal free routes over here. The people traveling to short destinations, for example, Bangalore to Chennai, which is a 30 minutes flight would not prefer to travel 2-3 hours to the new airport for a 30 minutes flight. It will be very expensive and time consuming. This problem only concerns the people living in south Bangalore, and not for someone like me who lives in North, quite near to the airport. The north bangaloreans were against all those complainers. They said that where were all these people when people from the north bangalore had to travel south HAL airport which took 2-3 hours? If the government did not do anything that time, then why now?

Anyway the centre does not approve of having two airports in a city. India’s infrastructure cannot hold it and it is economically not viable. The decision to construct a new airport was taken due to the constraint on expansion of the HAL airport and the need for creating additional facilities in tandem with the traffic growth. The HAL airport could not take the increasing traffic and so the agreement for the new airport was signed in July 2004 itself and everybody knew that a Rx 4500 crore project was conceived and was being taken up. The division Bench queried that if the airport was functioning for 40 years, then why can’t the authorities wait for 4 years? Holla replied that it was uneconomical to have two airports functioning in the city and Bangalore International Airport cannot achieve the break even even after 7-8 years. The authorities were given the examples of London, Paris, Bangkok and Kuala Lampur having two airports within 19-15 miles distance.

But PR Ramesh, counsel for B Krishna Bhat said that as per the agreement, in the next 25 years, no airport can come up in 150 km radius which embraces Mysore, Hassan and other towns. However, counsel for RK Misra sought for a technically qualified expert committee to examine the infrastructure that needs to be put in place and the next hearind is slated for March 10, which happens to be tomorrow. Let’s see what happens, would HAL airport close or will retain for sometime more till the connectivity issues improve. My next post will share views on the government relating to the same issues. I cannot believe how ignorant and stupid can the Karnataka government be. Stay tuned.

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