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Bangalore: The new international airport in Bangalore may not have opened yet, but industry leaders in India's Silicon Valley are already complaining that it is too small and too far away.
The privately-built airport, which is due to open today, is about 35 kilometres from the city centre, at the end of a road that already routinely gets jammed with traffic. The older state-run airport, closer to the city, is due to close.
"Seventy-five per cent of Bangalore's air traffic is business travel, and if it takes four to five hours to get to the airport and back to the city, how can you do business?" said Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman of India's top biotechnology firm, Biocon.
The Bangalore City Connect Foundation, an association of business leaders in the city, says authorities should renegotiate with Bangalore International Airport Limited, the new airport's owners, and keep the old one open.
Flight boom
"We need an international-quality airport and we are not saying don't open the new airport, but let's also utilise the infrastructure that is already there," said M. Lakshminarayan, the chairman of Bangalore City Connect.
India's airports are struggling to cope with a boom in the civil aviation sector, which is growing at more than 25 per cent a year, mainly due to rapidly rising incomes and the launch of many budget airlines.
The government has started awarding contracts to private companies to modernise some of the country's state-run airports that lacked basic facilities and were unable to handle the growing number of passengers.
About five million people flew in and out of Bangalore in 2004, when the new airport was planned. Now the figure is ten million, and likely to reach 15 million in a couple of years.
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