A day after Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia pulled up the management of Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) for sloppy passenger facilities, GMR Group chairman G M Rao met Ahluwalia to explain why the upgradation was running into delays.

In an hour-long meeting, Rao told the deputy chairman that clearances from various arms of the government held up DIAL’s plans to improve passenger facilities such as increasing security channels, immigration counters and X-Ray screening machines by about 4-6 months. While Ahluwalia acknowledged that some of the problems were not really of GMR’s making, he noted that the DIAL management should have anticipated them, given the robust 20 per cent rise in passenger traffic.

DIAL executives said the number of immigration counters is proposed to be increased from the existing 56 to 100 by June 2008, for which additional manpower and separate immigration cadre would be required. They also said clearances were needed to hire 1,400 additional Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) personnel to man the airport. The extra personnel would be required to handle the security channels to be more than doubled to 22 from 10 now. At present, 2,317 CISF personnel are posted at the Delhi airport.

In its presentation to the Planning Commission, DIAL also said it was planning to set up an interim terminal, at a cost of about Rs 100 crore, that will have a capacity to handle about 3 million passengers. This, it said, was not part of the Operation, Management Development Agreement (OMDA) signed between DIAL and the Airports Authority of India Ltd (AAI). Rao is also said to have told Ahluwalia that DIAL was planning to upgrade the Haj terminal since it remained idle for almost eight months a year. This would help DIAL shift some airlines to the Haj terminal.

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