Representatives from the ministry of civil aviation along with other stakeholders of the Navi Mumbai airport are expected to meet officials in the Prime Minister?s Office (PMO) in the hopes to remove new hurdles that have cropped up with the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) rejecting the environment clearance given to the project by the National Coastal Zone Management Authority (NCZMA).
The MoEF has “ignored recommendations of the NCZMA that cleared the project site late last year despite issues related to the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) that part of the tentative site falls in. We are now trying to get all stakeholders to meet the principal secretary to sort out this mess,? a civil aviation ministry official said. The MoEF had rejected the environment clearance last week.
The airport is expected to come up on around 2,750 acres of land in Navi Mumbai. According to sources in the ministry, nearly 1,140 hectares of land is needed to accommodate two parallel runways for simultaneous, segregated flight operations with full-length taxiways on either side of the runways. The airfield has been designed to accommodate the new large aircrafts compatible to aerodrome code 4-E. Much of this area lies in the protected coastal region.
?There is no other suitable land in the area that is good enough for the airport to come up on,? the official said. In a meeting with City & Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco) officials in November, the MoEF had agreed ?in-principle? to amend the CRZ 1 provision to accommodate the airport. However, the ministry backtracked last week.
The MoEF’s move has put a question mark over the airport project as it comes at a time when the state-run Cidco, which is a nodal agency for the proposed airport, has already selected consultant firm Louis Berger for preparing the masterplan for the airport.
The existing Mumbai international airport?s facilities are already highly strained. With the delay in clearance for building the new airport to service India?s financial capital the future growth of the aviation sector in the area is being questioned. Ministry officials say that it takes around 3-5 years to develop a new airport and the MoEF?s clearance is immediately needed to build an airport by 2012.
The MoEF had earlier ruled out development of the airport on the grounds that 25% of the proposed site falls under CRZ 1 and therefore no commercial development would be allowed there. An expert panel comprising members of the Central Water and Power Research Institute, Pune and IIT-Mumbai is already conducting a technical study so that mitigation measures can be devised for the project.