Adani signs pact for three airports

Concessionaires are required to take up the Guwahati, Jaipur and Thiruvananthapuram airports fulfilling certain conditions precedents within 180 days from 19th January, 2021, said AAI

New Delhi: The Adani Group on Tuesday signed concession agreements with the Airports Authority of India for the management, operations and development of Guwahati, Jaipur and Thiruvananthapuram airports. “The concessionaires are required to take up the Guwahati, Jaipur and Thiruvananthapuram airports fulfilling certain conditions precedents within 180 days from 19th January, 2021,” the Airports Authority of India (AAI) said in a press release.

The Centre had in February 2019 privatised six major airports of the country — Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Mangaluru, Thiruvananthapuram and Guwahati. Through a competitive bidding process, the Adani group won the rights to run all of them for 50 years. The AAI had handed over the airports in Lucknow, Ahmedabad and Mangaluru in October and November last year.

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“The concession fee that would be received by AAI after leasing out six airports will be used for the maintenance and development of other brownfield airports, and also for further development of RCS (regional connectivity scheme) and greenfield airports throughout the country,” the release said.

On September 5, 2019, the AAI had recommended the central government to privatise airports at Amritsar, Varanasi, Bhubaneswar, Indore, Raipur and Trichy. AAI chairman Arvind Singh last month said privatisation of these six airports would begin in the first quarter of 2021.