Prime Minister Narendra Modi will open the Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) on Wednesday, October 8. This is a historic event since Mumbai will join a small group of cities around the world, including London, New York, and Tokyo, that have more than one international airport. In December, the state-of-the-art facility will start doing business.
Adani Airport Holdings (AAHL) and the City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra Ltd (CIDCO) worked together as a public-private partnership to build the huge infrastructure project.
Important Information and Digital Features of NMIA
The Navi Mumbai International Airport is meant to be a modern and very useful airport:
NMIA will be India’s first fully digital airport, with full automation and AI-enabled services. This includes the ability to book parking spots for vehicles in advance and online services for dropping off luggage and going through immigration.
Size & Capacity:
1,160 hectares make up the airport.
In its first phase, NMIA will serve 20 million passengers a year with one runway and one terminal.
The airport is expected to handle an incredible 155 million passengers a year at full capacity, spread out over four terminals and two runways.
Cost and Economic Impact: The project cost ₹19,650 crore (about 196.5 billion Indian Rupees) to build, and it is expected to create more than two lakh (200,000) employment in a variety of fields, such as aviation, logistics, IT, hotel, and real estate.
First Operations: Commercial operations will start in December and will run for 12 hours a day at first. Officials think that at first, roughly 40% of the traffic will be from other countries. This will gradually rise to 75%.
Anxiety-Free Experience: Arun Bansal, the CEO of Adani Airports Holdings Ltd (AAHL), called the airport “anxiety-free” because it is so automated. He talked about things like AI-enabled luggage monitoring, which lets passengers get a text message on their phone telling them the number of the baggage carousel.
Multi-Modal Connectivity: The Navi Mumbai airport will be India’s first major aviation hub that is easily connected to a number of other transportation systems, such as expressways, metro and suburban rail networks, and waterway services.
Several Indian carriers, such as IndiGo, Air India Express, and Akasa Air, have already said they will start flying to and from NMIA and other destinations in the country.