Airlines Deals

Praful Patel, Union minister of state for civil aviation today announced that the UPA government is going to set up the base for maintenance of the entire fleet of Indian Airlines’ A-319 airbuses. He was speaking at the inaugural function of the NSC Bose airport-Dum Dum Cantonment railway link.

The link was inaugurated by the Union minister for railways, Lalu Prasad Yadav. Several state leaders, including minister for sports and transport, Subhas Chakrabarty, minister for self-help groups, Rekha Goswami, chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Railways, Basudev Acharya, attended the function. MPs Amitava Nandy, Taritbaran Topdar, Ajay Chakrabarty were also present on the occasion.

NSC Bose Airport at Dum Dum is the first airport in India to have railway connectivity. ‘‘We plan to introduce railway connections at airports in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore,’’ Patel said.

The Union minister said that modernisation of the six metro airports have to be completed before 2009 as India is going to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010. ‘‘A foreigner gets the first impression of a country from its airport. To make sure that we don’t cut a sorry figure at the first sight itself, the airports have to be revamped,’’ the minister said.

Patel added that Cooch Behar was going to be one of the 35 non-metro airports which the Union government plans to upgrade and modernise. The project requires an investment of around Rs 10,000 crore and will be completed by 2008.

‘‘While we are modernising the metro-airports we have also decided to revamp the non-metro airports. Talks are on, regarding Cooch Behar and we’ve requested the state government to come up with more suggestions for modernisation,’’ Patel said.

According to Patel, the government will not stop at modernising only 35 airports. ‘‘There are several non-metro airports that we plan to upgrade,’’ he said.