PM Modi Inaugurates Mopa International Airport In Goa, Names It After Late Manohar Parrikar

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, today (11 December) inaugurated the Mopa International Airport in Goa.

Chief Minister of Goa, Dr Pramod Sawant, Governor of Goa, P S Sreedharan Pillai, Union Minister of Civil Aviation, Jyotraditya Scindia were those present on occasion.

The government has named the new airport after late Manohar Parrikar.

Late Manohar Parrikar served as Goa chief minister and union defence minister. A veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, Manohar Parrikar passed away at the age of 63 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer in 2019.

After inaugurating the Mopa airport, PM said that through ‘Manohar International Airport,’ late Parikkar will remain in the memories of all the commuters.

Addressing the gathering, the Prime Minister recalled that it was Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government that had initially planned this airport.

The Prime Minister lamented that due to lack of effort by subsequent governments, the project remained abandoned for many years.

The Prime Minister said that once the ‘Double Engine Government’ came to the scene in 2014, work on the airport gained new momentum and he laid the foundation stone six years ago.

He said that despite legal hurdles and the pandemic, airport is ready to function today.

An alternative to the busy Dabolim airport

Developed at a cost of around Rs 2,870 crore, the airport has been built on the theme of sustainable infrastructure.

The foundation stone of the airport was laid by the Prime Minister in November 2016.

It comprises of environment friendly facilities like solar power plant, green buildings, LED lights on the runway, rainwater harvesting, state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant with recycling facilities.

Initially, phase-I of the Airport will cater to around 4.4 million passengers per annum (MPPA), which can be later expanded to a saturation capacity of 33 MPPA.

The Greenfield airport at Mopa in North Goa is built by GMR Goa International Airport Limited (GGIAL), a subsidiary of GMR Group.

Mopa airport has been built on a Design, Build, Finance, Operate and Transfer (DBFOT) basis and will be operated through GGIAL by GMR for a period of 40 years, extendable by 20 years, as per broad lease agreements.

This Airport will be a full-service airport catering to domestic and international passengers besides freight services.

Mopa Airport is keenly awaited as Dabolim airport is suffering from capacity constraint.

Dabolim airport is managed by Indian Navy, and continues to be India’s biggest Naval airfield.

The current terminal in use at Dabolim, is designed to handle 2,750 passengers per hour and around 5 million passengers annually, state government data shows.

The statistics, however, reveal that the airport has already handled 5.24 million passengers between April and September this year.

There is also the problem of the navy restricting civilian operations every morning between 9 am and 12.30 pm for practice sorties.

This means limited slots for scheduled commercial flights at Dabolim , which leads to high fares in peak travel season for passengers.