Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: After extensive inter-ministerial consultations, the Centre has decided to lease out 11 Airports Authority of India (AAI) airports through five bundled concessions, reports Businessline.
Accordingly, the public private partnership appraisal committee has given in-principle approval for the leasing out of the airports.
The development marks a key step forward in the Centre’s plan to bring private-sector participation into the operations, management and development of these airports.
According to the document, the five proposed airport bundles comprise Amritsar-Kangra, Varanasi-Gaya-Kushinagar, Bhubaneswar-Hubballi, Raipur-Aurangabad and Tiruchirappalli-Tirupati.
The proposals were considered at the 149th meeting of the appraisal committee held on August 4, with the committee granting in-principle approval for the five bundles.
Besides, this development comes after the Centre had been examining the bundling of larger and smaller airports to improve the long-term sustainability of smaller facilities through cross-subsidisation from larger airports.
The proposed concessions will cover the operations, management and development of the airports and will have a concession period of 50 years.
Notably, AAI will act as the sponsoring and implementing agency for the proposed transactions.
Following the in-principle approval, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) will undertake a market-sounding exercise with infrastructure players to assess investor interest in the proposed transaction structure.
As per the documents, since the bundling model is being attempted for the first time, feedback from potential private-sector participants will be considered before the proposal is modified, if required, and submitted to the committee for its final recommendation.
The proposed model is aimed at bringing private-sector participation into the development and operation of airports while improving the viability of smaller facilities through their bundling with larger airports.
The Union Government has been working on the proposal for several months.
In 2025, Businessline had reported that the plan to lease 11 AAI airports had moved to the PPPAC for scrutiny, with the Government considering a model of pairing larger airports with smaller ones.
The proposal had followed an earlier round of consultations within the government on leasing more than 10 AAI airports under the PPP model.
The latest decision now takes the proposal beyond the consultation stage, with MoCA set to engage potential investors before taking the proposal back to the committee for its final recommendation.
The proposed model is aimed at bringing private-sector participation into the development and operation of airports while improving the viability of smaller facilities through their bundling with larger airports.
The latest major round of AAI airport lease out was initiated in 2019, when Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Mangaluru airports were awarded to Adani Enterprises under 50-year PPP concessions.
In addition, the remaining three airports in the six-airport package — Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram — were subsequently awarded, with all six handed over to private concessionaires by October 2021.
The move is expected to bring private-sector capital and operational expertise into the development of the airports while creating a mechanism to support the long-term viability of smaller facilities.
