Mumbai: More than two decades after Goa’s Mopa International Airport was first proposed under the Congress-backed United Front government, and many political twists and turns later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will finally inaugurate it Sunday.
Located in North Goa’s Pernem taluka, 33 km from state capital Panaji, Mopa airport will start operating officially from 5 January next year. The older Dabolim airport in South Goa will also continue to function. Airlines like IndiGo and Go First have already announced their flight schedule from Mopa and Oman Air has declared that it will operate only out of the new airport.
However, the much-delayed Rs 2,870 crore project has gone through many ups and downs. While it was backed by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government during its second term in power, the Goa Congress had raised objections to it, claiming that the state didn’t need two airports.
On top of this, the project has faced land acquisition hurdles and stoked a north-south rift in the small 3,702 sq km state. The latter is largely because hotel and taxi owners in South Goa are worried that the swanky new airport will reduce tourist traffic to their part of the state.
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Why Mopa airport was proposed
The Mopa airport project was first proposed in 1997 because Dabolim Airport, which also doubles up as a Navy base, can get saturated.
Dabolim airport has certain restrictions on timings as it also serves the Navy and was built to serve four million passengers annually. It has, however, been catering to 7.5 million passengers per annum, and an expansion project is currently underway to boost its capacity to 13 million per annum.
The greenfield airport in Mopa is spread over 2,093 acres and is proposed to come up in four phases, with the first one catering to the traffic of 4.4 million passengers per annum, eventually taking the capacity up to 13.1 million passengers annually in the fourth phase, according to the masterplan for the airport that ThePrint has accessed.
Politics, protests kept project grounded
The Union Ministry of Civil Aviation formally approved the Mopa airport in 2000, but with a rider that the existing Dabolim airport would be closed down. This, however, sparked protests by members of South Goa’s tourism industry and the project went into cold storage.
Eventually, in 2010, the UPA government approved the Mopa airport project and announced that Dabolim airport would remain operational.
The project, however, could not immediately take off due to stiff initial opposition to land acquisition by Mopa’s farmers.
Meanwhile, fissures within the Goa Congress over the proposed Mopa airport started coming to the fore in 2013. Former Goa chief minister Churchill Alemao, who was then with the Congress, had openly gone against his party’s line by slamming the second airport, saying it will only benefit the neighbouring state of Maharashtra and could lead to the closure of the Dabolim airport.
The Goa Congress officially backtracked on the Mopa airport project in 2014 when a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government was in power in the state saying the existing airport at Dabolim will be sufficient for the next 70-80 years and the new airport project can be put on hold.
Belated take-off, but concerns remain
It was only in 2016 that the Goa government picked GMR Group to build the Mopa airport on a public-private partnership model after a tendering process. PM Modi laid the foundation stone for the airport in November 2016, but the next six years were not smooth sailing either.
According to the concession agreement signed with the GMR Group, the airport was to be made operational by September 2020, but there was yet another roadblock.
In January 2019, the Supreme Court halted the construction of the airport while hearing two appeals filed by Goa-based environmental activists challenging the National Green Tribunal’s clearance for the project.
The apex court lifted the stay only a year later, in January 2020, after which the Covid-19 pandemic considerably slowed work down.
Now, with Modi set to inaugurate the airport and airlines announcing their flight schedules, the project is officially off the ground, but it still has vocal detractors.
Serafino Cota, president of the Goan Small and Medium Hotels Association, told ThePrint that hotels in South Goa will lose international tourists in a big way because of Mopa airport.
“International charter tourism demands that the hotel should be at a 45-minute distance from the airport. Charters landing at Mopa will not want to sign with South Goa hotels because it will take three hours from the new airport to South Goa,” Cota said.
However, he acknowledged that it was too late for protesting. “We have lost the fight now against the government. We have to simply reposition now and focus more on domestic tourists looking at a family-oriented destination,” he added.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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