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Climate Change In Focus—India Wants To Build 100 New Airports Over The Next Five Years

This article is more than 4 years old.

You read that right. India wants to construct an average of 20 new airports every year for the next five years.

For anyone familiar with the red tape around a potential airport or additional runway construction at Heathrow and Gatwick for example, this rapid growth is unprecedented.

It has taken several years of commissions and debates to even award an additional runway between the U.K’s largest airports, which will still take up to another 9 years before construction of an additional landing strip is completed at Heathrow.

Much of the logistical prevention has been led by environmental groups who are not only concerned about the effect on the wider environment of increased aviation but importantly the local environment of birds and nature becoming potentially negatively affected by increased aircraft movements.

However, Asia’s third-largest economy wants to stimulate its economy through the construction of airports and transportation links.

Prime Minister Modi wants to stimulate growth in India by connecting smaller towns and villages and even potentially creating a plane lease financing business. The aim is to make India into a $5 trillion economy by 2025, however as I previously wrote about, India has long-faced issues with its aviation sector—where the government has supported the struggling Air India.

Without recent infrastructural investment, only 75 out of the country’s 450 runways were functional just three years ago. The government has now committed to investing 1 trillion rupees to build airports over the next five years.

The economic growth and investment in India’s growing middle class is certainly the input into growth, but with climate change so important and high on many governments agenda, can the environmental damage or such growth simply be ignored? I also recently wrote about how Delhi airport was actually closed due to the smog that lingered over the city and stopped air traffic earlier this year.

Low visibility at Delhi airport due to thick smog meant that 37 flights were canceled or diverted on November 3. India’s capital city has not been a stranger to thick blankets of smog over the city in recent years, however, the noxious air has recently hospitalised thousands of people.

Unless there can be preventative measures in place for such infrastructural expansion, anywhere around the world, then surely they should be debated and planned out better than just simply “constructing”.