This story is from March 29, 2017

Kushinagar international airport gets Rs 50 crore boost

The Yogi Adityanath government has given a fresh push to the proposed international airport in Kushinagar by approving an additional sum of Rs 50 crore for the ambitious project.
Kushinagar international airport gets Rs 50 crore boost
Representative image.
LUCKNOW: The Yogi Adityanath government has given a fresh push to the proposed international airport in Kushinagar by approving an additional sum of Rs 50 crore for the ambitious project.
The airport will be an important part of the long awaited Buddhist circuit comprising several districts in eastern UP and adjoining areas in Bihar. These include Sarnath, Kaushambi, Shravasti and Kapilvastu.
The fresh fund approval has raised the total budgetary allocation for the project to Rs 120 crore.
This sum is proposed to be used for development of a 3km-long runway—one of the longest in UP, a taxi way, tarmac and a boundary wall. Sources said the state government has set the deadline of July 2017 to complete the works before embarking on construction of an air traffic control office by the end of the year. Once completed, Kushinagar airport would become the third international airport in UP after Lucknow and Varanasi.
Proposed to be constructed over an area of around 300 acres, the airport is part of the Maitreya Project that envisages construction of a tall Buddha statue and structures important to Buddhism. Top sources in the state government told TOI the civil aviation department has been asked to work on the terminal building as a signature structure designed on a Buddhist theme. “There has been a growing demand for Buddhist tourist from east and southeast Asia. The construction of an international airport fulfils that demand,” said a senior government functionary privy to the development.
The proposed international airport has been hanging in fire for almost a decade over successive regimes in Uttar Pradesh. It was only in 2015 that the centre took the project under the ambit of ‘Heritage Tourism Circuit’. On May 2, 2016, the then-Union minister of state for civil aviation and tourism Mahesh Sharma had said that the central and UP governments would jointly work towards the project and that most formalities had been completed.

The project was initially conceptualized on a public-private-partnership (PPP) model wherein a private developer would develop and operate the airport. In January 2014, the Akhilesh Yadav government had cleared the project under design build finance operate transfer (DBFOT) basis and approved the final bid document.
Even as the state government acquired land, no developer turned up. Eventually, the state government took up the project on its own. Sources said the state government has now agreed to hand over construction of the terminal building to Airports Authority of India.
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