The government is set to initiate the next phase of airport privatisation in 2025, aiming to lease out a fresh batch of Airports Authority of India (AAI)-run airports to private entities under the public-private partnership (PPP) model.

The Civil Aviation Ministry has identified five major airports - Amritsar, Varanasi, Bhubaneswar, Raipur, and Trichy, which will be bundled with six smaller airports such as Kushinagar and Kangra for collective bidding. The strategy of clubbing commercially viable airports with smaller ones is designed to attract greater private interest and ensure the development of lesser-served regions. 

In the previous round, six airports - Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangalore, Jaipur, Guwahati, and Thiruvananthapuram, were handed over to Adani Enterprises, which secured 50-year operational rights under a per-passenger fee model. This differed from the earlier revenue-share based 30-year lease terms. As of now, 11 airports in India are privately operated, including key hubs like Delhi and Mumbai, which together handle nearly 50 percent of the country’s total passenger traffic. The government has set a long-term target of developing 350 operational airports by 2047, up from the current 159. 

The official further noted that Metro cities such as Chennai and Bengaluru are exploring locations for second airports, following the upcoming launches of Navi Mumbai International Airport and Noida International Airport, both expected to become operational by mid-2025.

According to the official, “Small airports such as those located at Kushinagar, Kangra and others will be clubbed with the bigger ones. So these are small airports and not necessarily loss-making ones. The best way to define them is a small airport with a capacity of about 0.1 million (100,000) PPA (passenger per annum).”