HC pulls up K’taka for lack of connectivity to new airport

The Karnataka High Court has pulled up the government for not providing connectivity to the new Bangalore airport, reports CNBC-TV18. The Court has asked the Centre to continue talks to keep the old Bangalore airport open for smaller aircrafts.
It was the vacation bench that took up this hearing primarily because the new airport was slated to open today. They heard the case over two days. It was a marathon session and they took more than 10 hours to hear both sides of the argument. But at the end, they said they are not going to pass any interim order that would stay the opening of BIAL primarily because of two issues: there wasn’t conclusive enough evidence about the efforts of the state government in providing connectivity. This was the main contention of the petitioners that there was some connectivity, But there was trouble and the Court admitted that.

The other issue was the fact that world over all airports had been notified that there would be a change of the airport code that is given to every single airport. The BLR code for Bangalore, which would move from the HAL Airport to the BIAL would happen at midnight today. So, because other airports had already been intimated they didn’t want to cause confusion by making a change at the last hour. But the Court has taken the issue very seriously. It has chastised the state and the union government, particularly the state government, because it has not taken enough efforts to put in the required connectivity for the new airport.

One of the things that they have said is that the union government should seriously renegotiate the terms of the contract. If according to the renegotiation they do want HAL to remain open, they must open HAL once again and that must be done immediately after the discussions takes place.

The Ministry of Civil Aviation lawyers have said that the renegotiations will take about 12 weeks’ time. So, until then we do have some time for the legal tussle to settle down a bit.

For all practical purposes, for anyone who is flying into or out of Bangalore, the old airport is shut. But Airports Authority of India is also working on a study to determine what the kind of traffic flow will be at the new airport, because there was a contention that the traffic flow into Bangalore will far exceed what the new airport is built for.

That study is expected to come out in four weeks’ time. Once that is done, renegotiations will start. But until then, for the 12 weeks that the Ministry of Civil Aviation has sought, HAL will definitely remain shut.
2008-05-23 20:34:24
Source : News Bulletins/CNBC-TV18
By Roshni Menon/CNBC-TV18
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