India will push ahead with plans to build a new international airport terminal in New Delhi and a new domestic terminal in Mumbai to raise their facilities to world standards, an official said on Friday.
The state-owned Airports Authority of India has issued a request for proposals from architects to design the passenger terminals whose cost could be high as Rs 2,000 crore (Rs 20 billion), the AAI official said.
The New Delhi and Mumbai airports are India's most profitable with traffic growing at about five per cent a year.
The AAI decided to go ahead with plans to improve the airports since government approval for their privatisation had been delayed, the official said.
The cost of the new terminals is expected to be funded by the airports authority and the federal government, he said.
The government had aimed to privatise four of its busiest airports in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai to help upgrade their facilities.
But it deferred a decision on their privatisation on January 3 and asked the civil aviation and finance ministries to discuss the proposal. It said it would reconsider the plan in a month.
"The privatisation process is under review," the AAI official said. "But this is unduly delaying the plan to upgrade the airports. Some kind of work on improving the facilities should begin."
Moves to modernise the other two airports at Calcutta and Madras have been deferred, he said.
India threw open several state-dominated infrastructure industries to private companies over the last decade to supplement government investment and improve the quality of service in one of the world's fastest growing economies.
But in several areas, such as power, unattractive pricing and regulatory wranglings have blunted private investment interest.
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