Pune: Try and look up the schedule of flights in and out of Pune, and you will find that there are none landing in the city between 7:30 am and 10:30 am and none taking off between 7:50 am and 11:05 am.
So, if anyone has to travel to or from a city that is among the country’s premier industrial, IT, and entrepreneurial hubs, they have to be either a very early riser or risk wasting most of the first half of a business day.
This is just one among the many limitations of having a defence base as the only airport in a bustling commercial city. It is also one of the many factors that make a full-fledged civilian airport necessary for a city like Pune, industrialists and experts say.
But, for Pune, such an airport has been a pipe dream for nearly two decades. Travellers have to make do with the current Lohegaon airport.
Every time there is a high-profile visit to Pune, such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the city on 1 August for the inauguration of metro rail projects, state politicians start talking about expediting a brand new civilian Pune International Airport. But little comes out of such statements.
Over the years, as governments changed, so did plans. Pune district officials say that the process of identifying suitable land for the airport started in 2004 under the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government. Sites such as Talegaon Dabhade, Saswad, Rajgurunagar, and Chakan, especially, were considered.
In 2015, following stiff opposition to land acquisition for the airport in Chakan, the Devendra Fadnavis government and the undivided Shiv Sena dropped the plan and chose a new site at Purandar.
But today, the airport project is far from taking off, and there is stringent opposition to land acquisition in Purandar as well.
“I am not saying that Pune should have an international airport. I am saying it is a foregone conclusion. Pune should have ‘had’ an international airport,” says HP Srivastava, vice chairperson of the Deccan Chamber of Commerce Industries & Agriculture (DCCIA), a 30-year-old government body with close to 180 member companies.
And Srivastava’s pessimism about a new civilian international airport in Pune is only growing.
“It’s a pity that we haven’t done anything in eight years since the site was shifted to Purandar. And now, again, it is boiling [down] to farmers unwilling to part with their land. So, this plan too seems to be going to Chakan way,” he adds.
‘The Chakan way’
On the afternoon of 31 August, Mahadev Tilekar, a farmer from Munjewadi village in Pune’s Purandar taluka, proudly strolled through his pomegranate plantations, inspecting their deep red flowers and luscious fruits. He had just won a local award for his plantations.
Tilekar, locally known as ‘Nana’, is part of the Sangarsh Samiti, an agitation committee of members from all seven villages in the Purandar taluka where the new airport is proposed to come up.
“I don’t know for how long all this prosperity will last. This airport plan is like a sword hanging over our heads,” he says.
The trigger for Nana’s latest concern was statements by Deputy CMs Ajit Pawar and Devendra Fadnavis, who recently vowed to fast-track the Purandar airport project following Modi’s August visit.
Nana recalls that, in 2016, the committee staged a large protest against airport construction outside the divisional commissioner’s office in Pune. Many of them were also detained by the police for hours.
“We are willing to do that again,” Nana says.
At the time, the Fadnavis government zeroed in on Purandar, identifying about 2,000 hectares across the villages of Pargaon, Khanvadi, Kumbharvalan, Ekhatpur, Vanpuri, Munjwadi, and Udachiwadi as the most suitable land for the project. In the government’s books, this site is labelled ‘1A.’
To farmers in these villages, the choice of land for the airport beats logic. It is all fertile land yielding good-quality pomegranates, custard apples, peas, soybeans, and sugarcane.
“We have small land holdings here, but they are all bagayati (of fertile plantation farming). If they build the airport here, where will we all go?” says Jayashree Zorange, wearing an oversized shirt above her saree as she sits in the middle of her family’s lush two-acre pea farm.
Across the seven villages, farmers recall a story of broken promises. In 2019, Congress’ Sanjay Jagtap won the Assembly election from Purandar mainly on the promise that he would get the airport site shifted. And, for a while, it seemed that he may just be able to fulfil it.
Then, the undivided Shiv Sena splintered its alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the poll and later joined hands with the Congress and NCP to form the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). This government scrapped the 1A plan and identified a different cluster of villages about 20 kilometres away. This site, in government books, is ‘5A.’
Within three years, though, there was another twist. In 2022, when the MVA alliance toppled, and the Eknath Shinde-led government came to power, the 5A plan was dropped.
“CM Eknath Shinde and Deputy CM Fadnavis reviewed the project in August 2022 and decided that we should revert to the 1A site since all the clearances required were already taken. They gave directions to the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) to start land acquisition for the project. We handed over all the data that we had about the site to MIDC,” says an official from the Maharashtra Airport Development Corporation on the condition of anonymity.
While Vipin Sharma, MIDC chief executive, did not respond to ThePrint’s calls and text messages, gram panchayat officials of Munjewadi, Ekhatpur, and Khanvadi say that the corporation is yet to publish a formal notification to start the land acquisition process.
“The gram panchayats of all seven villages have passed multiple resolutions opposing the airport project. We even sent a memorandum to Fadnavis when he was in Purandar this month for a government event,” says Kiran Hole, sarpanch of Khanvadi.
At the event, Fadnavis appealed to all political leaders in the Pune district to “keep political differences aside” and support the Purandar airport project at the chosen site.
“Without the airport, development of the Pune district cannot be achieved,” he had said.
Why Pune needs a new airport
The Pune district has the most private IT parks in Maharashtra — 203 of the state’s total 577 as per the latest Economic Survey. It also draws the maximum industrial investment in the state at Rs 1.67 lakh crore of Maharashtra’s total Rs 3.79 lakh crore.
The city’s air traffic numbers, though, belie its commercial importance. The Economic Survey shows that in 2021-22, the Pune airport had 36.95 lakh domestic passengers and a paltry 18,000 international passengers as against neighbouring Mumbai airport’s 1.85 crore and 31.83 lakh.
Despite being an industrial fulcrum in Maharashtra, the domestic cargo movement from Pune airport was 28,697 metric tonnes in 2022, while there was zero international cargo. Again, in comparison, Mumbai airport’s domestic cargo was a robust 2.14 lakh metric tonnes, while the international cargo was 5.56 lakh metric tonnes.
“Earlier, defence airfields and civilian airfields coexisted in many cities. But, in the last 20 years, while the defence’s requirement may have shot up by about 20 per cent, the civil aviation demand from Pune has increased manifold. And in a defence airport, war preparedness is a constant. They have their [own] schedules of training and various exercises. It is civil traffic that is infringing on it,” says Nitin Welde, retired group captain and member of the Rotary Wing Society of India.
Other than the roughly 2.5-hour morning block, the Lohegaon airport also has a five-hour block when civil traffic is not permitted — from 11 am to 4 pm every Saturday.
This, Welde says, is to maintain the airport’s ‘Aircraft Arrester Barrier System’, a technology that helps combat aircraft prevent landing and take-off overruns.
With all these constraints, most people from Pune end up flying out from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) in Mumbai, which is over 150 kilometres away and takes close to four hours to reach.
“I used to travel extensively on business — within India and abroad. I used to travel abroad once a month. I always came to Mumbai to fly out of the country since Pune doesn’t have suitable international connections. Of late, I have had to cut down on my travel since driving to Mumbai to fly out is impractical and time-consuming,” says Vikram Ogale, chief executive of VO Power, which supplies power generation products in India and globally.
If it is domestic air travel, Ogale and his colleagues fly out a day before.
“This basically increases the cost of travel and is also a waste of time. Taking domestic flights at 4-5 am essentially means that you have to wake up at 2 am and then go through an entire working day being sleep deprived at the destination city,” Ogale says.
Those who support the construction of Purandar Airport worry that once Mumbai’s Navi Mumbai International Airport becomes operational next year, plans for the former could slow down even further. This new airport would be at least 40 kilometres closer than the CSMIA for travellers from Pune.
While successive governments drag their feet on a new international airport in Pune, the Airport Authority of India (AAI) has been working on expanding the existing airport to accommodate more civilian flights. It is also constructing a new terminal building that will expand the total area of the Pune airport to nearly 70,000 sq m from 22,300 sq m. There will be a multi-level car parking and a cargo complex as well.
The new airport terminal will solve Pune’s air travel woes to a certain extent, but the challenges of balancing civil operations with those of defence will continue.
Moreover, Welde says that Pune’s air transport requirements cannot be met by simply expanding the current airport.
“Any expansion has to be lateral because the aero bridge is lateral. From that point of view, the new Pune airport is a project overdue,” he says.
Meanwhile, in the seven villages where the Purandar airport is proposed to take shape, life seems suspended in indecision. Someone wants to build a farm pond, another wants to rebuild their house, and others want to try out a new plantation. But none of them know whether they should pump money into these plans right now. It could all come under the wrecking ball, after all.
“Don’t talk to anyone about the airport here,” says Dattatreya Tilekar, a small farmer and an employee of the Munjewadi-Ekhatpur gram panchayat. “Doka out hota (It is exasperating).”
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)