Navi Mumbai int’l airport to be ready by mid-2020: CM

MUMBAI: The Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) will be ready by the middle of 2020, said chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday at the Global Aviation Summit in Mumbai.

Fadnavis, who had first announced the airport will be completed by 2019, announced that the airport development is on track and will be operative by mid-next year. The comment comes at a time when 10% of the villagers displaced by the project are yet to vacate the area.

The CM said the NMIA would contribute one percent to the country’s GDP and is aimed at boosting Indian aviation. He said, “Apart from NMIA, Pune and Nagpur airports are also being worked on.” The minister of commerce and industry and civil aviation Suresh Prabhu said their latest review of the project indicated everything was going according to plan. A statement by the City Industrial Development Corporation, the planning agency,said if the remaining 10% of villagers do not vacate the airport land till Tuesday, they would not be given compensation.

GVK, which runs Mumbai airport, was awarded letter of consent in October 2017 after which pre-development work had begun. However, this work, which includes the levelling of land, is yet to be completed. Aviation secretary RN Choubey, in September last year, had said that it will take another three years for the first flight to take off from the city’s second airport and that the ministry hopes its first flight will take off by September 2021.