ETW Staff – Mumbai
A New Integrated Terminal Building has been inaugurated by Ajit Singh, minister of civil aviation, at Goa Airport. Dedicating the new facility to the people of the state, the minister said, “Providing quality aviation infrastructure commensurate with the expected passenger traffic growth is high on priority of my ministry. Expansion and upgradation of airport at such a tourist and industry destination as Goa assumed significant importance.”
The New Terminal Building at Goa is an integrated terminal building capable of handling both domestic and international operations. The terminal building is equipped with the state-of-the-art facilities like passenger boarding bridges, CUTE enabled check-in counters, inline compatible baggage handling system, software based building management system, elevators and escalators. The terminal building can handle 2750 peak hour passengers at a time. The terminal building has been built at a cost of INR 345 crore.
Highlighting the contribution of Goa in overall economic growth of the country. Singh said, “Goa Airport with 1,000 plus annual international charter flights accounts for almost 90 per cent of India’s international charter tourist flights. In the year 2012-13, Goa Airport handled 1,208 charter flights, an increase of 45 per cent over the year 2011-12.”
Civil aviation has become a focal point of the development as it is a key infrastructure that connects people, shrinks distances and facilitates the growth of business and seamless flow of investment, leading to multiplier effect across the economy. Expressing the hope that India’s domestic air travel market will become the second highest growing market in the world in near future, Singh said “the domestic passenger movement in the next ten years shall exceed 336 million passengers per annum and international passenger traffic shall cross 84 million mark from the current level of 117 million domestic and 43 million international passengers in 2012-13.”
KC Venugopal, minister of state for civil aviation, said that the ministry has been giving priority to enhance airport infrastructure in India, modernisation of existing airport infrastructure in metro and non-metro cities and construction of green field airports to bridge the gap between available airport capacity and projected demand.
