Centre serious over setting more airports in NE

Aizawl, Aug 21: In a major development, Union Civil Aviation ministry has chalked out a blue-print on setting up new airports and as well as improving the standards of the existing aircraft landing stations across NE region.

The proposal of setting up three new airports would be in Sikkim, Kohima and Itanagar, the official sources here today said.

North Eastern Council (NEC) would be entrusted the task of strengthening as many as ten airports across NE region at the cost of more than Rs 15 crores.

Out of 10 number of airports in the region, seven were already in the completion stage.

The work of Silchar, Dibrugarh (Asom) and Barapani (Mehalaya) airports are in various stages of progress.

Apart from this, civil aviation ministry is also considering providing incentives to airlines to operate on non-economic routes, especially in the NE state, as part of the proposed new Civil Aviation Policy, the sources added.

There are 455 airstrips/airports in the country out of which 127 airports are managed by Airport authority of India (AAI).

While Asom has six operational airports belonging to Airport Authority of India including civil enclaves, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura has one each.

The maintenance cost these airports for the last three years were Rs 33.06 crores in 2003-04, Rs 23.25 in 2004-05 and Rs 25.29 crore in 2005-06 respectively.

UNI