New Delhi Sixteen of India’s busiest airports are working on a government-coordinated plan to tackle peak season rush, civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said in an interview to HT’s Neha LM Tripathi and Sunetra Choudhury. The minister added that the plan includes deployment of equipment and personnel, as well as expansion of facilities, with deadlines for the next winter and summer seasons. Edited excerpts:

The government has been working hard to prepare for the upcoming festive rush . What are the various initiatives taken this year apart from the ones taken last year? Is there a plan in place to handle peak hour flights during this travel period? An airport is the conveyor, if you will, between the demand created by a customer and the service supplied by an airline and the role of a conveyor has to be one of facilitating demand reaching supply. Therefore there must never be bottlenecks on that critical path where you play the role of a conveyor or a facilitator because you happen to be the only gateway through which demand will meet supply. If the customer is ready and the supply is ready then there should be no reason why they should experience any hardship.

Having said that, all the touch points that a customer experiences from entering the airport premises, the entry gate, the check-in point, the baggage drop, the security check, the boarding gate, and onto the aircraft — all these five touch points have to be seamless, which is why we brought in DigiYatra, which has been a rip-roaring success. Close to six million passengers have used DigiYatra to date. So, in 16 airports, metro and non-metro ones that take a maximum amount of traffic, we sat with various stakeholders and identified the capacity required at each one of these touch points including the X-ray machines, the CISF (Central Industrial Security Force) personnel , the number of boarding gates etc. We have put together a pert chart for every single airport in terms of when they will deliver on this. Some of those deadlines are pre-winter schedule, some of them will be pre-summer schedule so there is a very clear path going forward in terms of what we are going to do to be able to achieve that amount of throughput. We are in dialogue with the MHA (Ministry of Home Affairs) and we have clearly articulated the demand of CISF and Bureau of Immigration (BOI) requirement of staff in winter 2023 and summer 2024 .

Is there a plan in place for managing flights during the peak hour rush during the winter schedule?So there is a plan in place based on what we derived the last time around.But having said that, for me, ideally that is not the best solution. Ideally, the best solution is to be able to increase my infrastructure adequately to make sure I’m able to supply. At whatever time any airline wants to be able to fly a flight, subject to runway capability and ATC (air traffic control) capability, because that’s the independent factor; all of this is the dependent factor. So we are trying to do a little bit of both until summer of ’24 when we will have that full capacity. For example in Mumbai, we broke down and created a new security area that should be opened up hopefully in a week. It has taken us four months to create that. But I’ve worked with the airport operator and we’ve created that new capacity.

The government is planning to come up with new airports in cities across Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Which are these airports and when are they expected to be operationalised? A large number of airports are coming up in UP. Aligarh (Aligarh dist.) , Ayodhya (Ayodhya dist.), Azamgarh (Azamgarh dist.), Chitrakoot (Chitrakoot dist.), Fursatganj (Amethi dist.), Moradabad (Moradabad dist), Shravasti (Shravasti dist.), Sarsawa (Saharanpur dist.) and Noida International Airport are all set to be operational next year, and in Madhya Pradesh, we will have the new terminal in Gwalior before the end of this year, which hopefully will not only be a national, but a world record because we laid the foundation stone on the 16th of October last year and the ₹500 crore airport, 2.50 lakh square feet large, will be ready by the end of November or December this year. So that’s 13 months ; Jabalpur airport terminal will be ready as well. Rewa and Datia airports should be ready by March next year.

When will the Cape Town Convention Bill be passed? We are working to make sure that we are in line [with] and adopt international norms with regard to financing of airplanes and so for that we are in the process of facilitating a bill called the Cape Town Convention which will also enable India to emerge as a leasing hub. Most of the planes are leased today out of Ireland, so the Cape Town Convention Bill was something that was a WIP (work in progress) and it’s currently going through interministerial consultation.

We were initially trying to bring it in the monsoon session, but we’ll now hopefully bring it in the winter session. In the interim, we had a situation with one of our airlines (Go First filed for insolvency) and through that process, there was a moratorium on the assets that was imposed leading to a great deal of apprehension on behalf of the lessors as well as the airlines in terms of increasing finance costs for the acquisition of aircraft (NCLT put a moratorium on airplanes and other dues and debt leading to lessors not being able to take their aircraft back). A large number of our aircraft today are leased. Therefore we had to approach the ministry of finance and the ministry of corporate affairs to provide that exemption in the IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code) rules and it was notified yesterday (the government, on Wednesday exempted aircraft from the moratorium put by National Company Law Tribunal). So now we are in consonance with international laws pending the passage of the CTC bill, which hopefully will come in the winter session.