Greater Noida/Lucknow: Speculation about the number of runways Jewar international airport will have when fully complete can now be set at rest. The greenfield airport, one of the country’s biggest new infrastructure projects, will have a total of five runways, the project monitoring and implementation committee (PMIC) headed by the chief secretary decided on Thursday.
The PMIC made the decision after discussions with senior bureaucrats from the chief minister’s office, the civil aviation directorate and the chief executive officers of the three industrial development authorities in Noida and Greater Noida (some members participated in the meeting virtually) to examine the feasibility report prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The state government had initially proposed to build six runways at the airport, which is to be developed over 4,752 hectares of land over the next 20 years. There was also talk of expanding the number of proposed runways to eight.
Five runways too will make the airport the largest in the country unless any of the existing airports adds more runways by the time the Jewar project is complete. Delhi’s IGI is the process of building a fourth runway,
The concessionaire of the airport project, Zurich AG, is expected to reveal the master plan and design of the first phase of the Jewar international airport on December 6.
The first phase, which will have two runways, has been planned over 1,334 hectare of land which has been acquired and demarcated. Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority CEO Arun Vir Singh, who is also director of the special purpose vehicle Noida International Airport Ltd, was among those present at the meeting. Singh said, “We have already got consent of the government to start work on land acquisition for the second phase. We are chalking out plans and will notify the villages and localities coming under the purview of the second phase shortly,” said Singh.
Planned over 3,418 hectares of land, the second phase will be executed in two phases. For the first phase, YEIDA will take over 1,365 hectares and hand it over to Zurich AG. For the second phase, 1,318 hectares will be acquired and amalgamated for future expansion plans of the airport. A third phase is on the drawing board too, with a proposal to acquire an additional 735 hectares.