Centre clears Mohali International airport project

Chandigarh, Sep 6 (UNI) The central government has finally cleared the decks for the Punjab governments ambitious International Airport project at Mohali.

The clearence was given at a special meeting in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) yesterday, an official spokesman here today stated.

The central government representatives at the meeting included Principal Secretary to Prime Minister, Mr T K A Nair, Defence Secretary, Vijay Singh, Civil Aviation Secretary, Ashok Chawla and the Chairman of Airport Authority of India (AAI) K Rama Raman. the state government officials at the meeting were Chief Secretary R I Singh and Secretary Civil Aviation Viswajit Khanna.

As per the agreement the stake sharing between the Union Government and Punjab Government will be in the ratio of 51 per cent and 49 per cent respectively.

The existing infrastructure of the Civil-cum-Defence-Airport at Chandigarh would be integrated into the Mohali International Airport.

The Punjab Government has already announced that the International Airport at Mohali would be named after Shaheed-E-Azam Bhagat Singh.

Reacting to the development Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) acting president Sukhbir Singh Badal said that this was one of the major components of the commitment made by the SAD-BJP alliance in their manifesto for the Assembly elections. He said that with the clearance the process of modernising infrastructure in the state would get a further boost.

The state government had already proposed to set up of a Civil Aviation University for training the youth in the field of civil aviation. The government has already cleared the proposal to set up three flying training schools at Amritsar, Ludhiana and Bathinda in public private partnership ( PPP) mode besides upgrading the infrastructure at Patiala Flying Training Academy.

Efforts were afoot to tie up with the leading players in the field of civil aviation for setting up of world-class pilot training centers in the state.

UNI