Gujarat plans Rs 1,000 crore Dholera airport project to take on world's best in Dubai

MUMBAI: The Gujarat government expects a new airport in an ancient port city of Dholera in the state to take on Dubai as a global hub.

The Rs 1,000 crore project has been actively backed by the Narendra Modi government and has been envisaged when Modi was chief minister of Gujarat, said general manager, Dholera International Airport, a state-run company.

Dholera is located about 100 kilometers from Ahmedabad and is a similar distance from the other key city of Vadodara. The town covers a total area of 920 square kilometres but its Wikipedia page claims it will be developed into a megacity by 2025, six times the size of Shanghai, the largest city by population in the world. Shanghai is spread across 6.340.5 square meters of municipal area. Dholera’s page doesn’t clarify how it will reach a several multiples of Shanghai’s proportions.

Chavda said the Dholera airport will be an alternate to Ahmedabad which will be saturated in the next five years.

As to why it will make a better hub than Dubai, he said that a Heathrow-Dholera-Singapore flight will entail a distance than is 322 kilometers lesser than a Heathrow-Dubai-Singapore airport.

A total of 1,426 hectares has been selected as the site for the airport which “can have” two runways of lengths 4,000 meters and 2,900 meters,” according to its brochure. The brochure ironically sports a picture of one of the terminals at the Dubai airport, lined on one side with Emirates’ planes. Still, aiming to beat Dubai as a hub is ambitious.

The Gulf airport recently overtook London’s Heathrow to become the busiest in the world handling 70.48 million passengers in 2014.

The airport has four multi-level terminals--one which has been built at a cost of $8 billion or approximately Rs 45,000 crore—and three concourse connections between them. It handles 140 airlines connecting to 270 destinations and contributes over $26.7 billion to Dubai’s economy or 27% of its GDP.

Dubai is planning to build a $32 billion second airport with five runways.