Kalyan could become Mumbai’s second airport base before Navi Mumbai

Kalyan is believed to take over Navi Mumbai to host Mumbai’s second airport. Having maximum number of landings and take-offs on a single runway, Mumbai airport is one of the busiest airports in the country and seeks another airport to manage the high traffic.

Keeping this in mind, an airport is being constructed at Navi Mumbai but the work is taking much time. However, before that, government is planning to revive a non-functional airport at Kalyan, a city near Mumbai.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation informed the media that the government earlier received several proposals from various airline companies to fly to and from Kalyan under its regional connectivity scheme. Considering these proposals, the ministry will seek financial bids by airline operators under the government’s regional connectivity scheme.

The scheme is called UDAN (‘Ude Desh Ka Aam Naagrik’) which when translated in English means ‘the country’s common man flies.’ “The airport is not even functional, and we have received four to five proposals under the UDAN scheme to connect Kalyan with regional routes,” an official mentioned.

UDAN is now in its second phase and the scheme is planned in such manner that name of the bidder will be a secret/unknown. Government will open the counter bids on Thursday wherein they will reveal the name of the bidders. As per officials, there were 17 companies which submitted bids with 141 proposals. Then government received 55 counter proposals from 10 applicants. Bidders in this phase were Interglobe Aviation (IndiGo parent), Jet Airways, and SpiceJet.