Union Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya M. Scindia has urged the Telangana government to re-examine the request of Hyderabad International Airport Limited (HIAL) for extending the concession agreement for another 30 years.

In a letter to Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, he urged the state government to re-examine HIAL’s request and submit its recommendations to the Ministry of Civil Aviation.

Scindia mentioned that a Concession Agreement (CA) dated December 20, 2004, was executed between the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Government of India and HIAL for the development, construction, operation and maintenance of Hyderabad International Airport.

The HIAL has requested for extension of its concession period for another 30 years beyond the initial 30 years, i.e beyond March 23, 2038, and till 23.03.2068.

Scindia also underscored the issue of operationalization of Warangal Airport and its inclusion under Regional Connectivity Scheme (RCS) -UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik). He mentioned that Warangal Airport is within 150 km aerial distance of HIAL and can be developed with a mutually agreeable solution, to be explored by the State Government of Telangana with HIAL and Airports Authority of India (AAI).

The HIAL is a joint venture company promoted by the GMR Group (63 per cent) in partnership with the Airports Authority of India (13 per cent), the Government of Telangana (13 per cent) and Malaysia Airports Holdings Berhad (MAHB) (11 per cent).

The GHIAL was mandated to design, finance, build and operate Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA), Hyderabad as a world-class Greenfield airport on the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model.

As per the information on the GMR website, Hyderabad Airport was commissioned in a record time of 31 months and inaugurated on March 14, 2008, with an initial capacity of 12 million passengers per annum (MPPA) and 150,000 tonnes of cargo handling capacity per annum. The airport master plan has the flexibility to increase the ultimate capacity to over 100 MPPA in phases.

Currently, Hyderabad Airport handles over 21 million passengers and around 148,000 tons of cargo annually and serves 17 International destinations through 21 International and 3 Indian passenger carriers and has 8 domestic carriers operating to around 53 domestic destinations. Five cargo airlines operate dedicated freighter services from Hyderabad Airport.