APA Issue 3, 2021
MAKING MILESTONES Bangalore International Airport Limited’s managing director and CEO, Hari Marar, tells Joe Bates more about the ambitions and development plans for India’s third busiest gateway.
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engaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport has been making milestones since it opened, and the desire to be the best airport in India means that this trend is unlikely to stop over the coming decades. It became the first new greenfield airport in India for more than half a century and the first ever to be established under the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model when it opened for business on May 24, 2008. Indeed, operator, Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) arguably set the tone for things to come in India by showing just what could be achieved by private investors working in partnership with the state, Airports Authority of India (AAI) and other shareholders. Upon opening, the airport boasted a 74,000sqm terminal, a single runway and, at the time, the most advanced technology at an Indian airport that equipped it to handle up to 12 million passengers per annum. Expansions to the terminal in 2010-2012, and the opening of a second runway in late 2019 – each project triggered by rising traffic volumes – means that Bengaluru Kempegowda International Airport (BLR) now has a single terminal building and two parallel runways
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capable of handling up to 35 million passengers per annum and 90 aircraft movements per hour. The extra capacity was certainly needed as BLR was one of the world’s fastest growing airports in 2018 and handled a record 33.65 million passengers in 2019. And BIAL is certainly far from finished in terms of enhancing the airport’s existing facilities and adding new ones as the ongoing construction of its new $1.8 billion Terminal 2 clearly demonstrates. NEW TERMINAL 2 Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and being built by Larsen & Toubro, BIAL is confident that the new Terminal 2 will be a game changer for BLR in terms of enhancing its operational efficiency, capacity and the award-winning levels of customer service it is able to offer passengers. BIAL’s managing director and CEO, Hari Marar, says: “Our vision is to make BLR the new ‘Gateway to India’, and to achieve this we are investing around $1.8 billion on infrastructure that will initially increase our capacity to 55 million passengers per annum in the short to medium-term. “We are in the process of constructing Terminal 2 and are scheduled to commence operations at the facility in 2022.”
