Rail Based Public Transport Facility to Large Indian Airports

The growth of Indian aviation sector in the past one decade is quite remarkable and between 2000 & 2010 air operations have expanded by 160%, in terms of domestic passenger volume India now ranks 4th after US, China and Japan. Indian aviation is set for transformational growth, Center for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) projections indicate that airport passenger traffic will grow from 143 million in 2010/11 to 452 million by 2020/21. To meet this ever growing demand and to provide world class infrastructure to its users, Government of India (GOI) decided to develop airport infrastructure on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode and has taken a number of initiatives to open the sector for private participation in modernizing existing airports as well as setting up new greenfield airports. However present airport infrastructure creation /up gradation policy of GOI has not considered provision of rail based transport access as an essential part of airport infrastructure facility in the same spirit as it was considered elsewhere in the world. In this paper, to understand the traffic and travel issues of the airport users and to appreciate the importance of rail based public transport access to airports, the case studies of existing Delhi Airport Metro Express (DAME) of Delhi airport, proposed metro link to Mumbai airport and proposed high speed rail link of Bengaluru are presented in detail in this paper.