Construction activity at various airports was on to take in additional capacity of nearly 10 crore passengers per year in the country, Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel told Parliament on Tuesday.
The minister said measures have been taken to augment capacity as a result of which additional capacity to handle 6.01 crore passengers per annum on the domestic sector and 3.1 crore  on international sector was under construction. These would be  commissioned within the next two to three years.
The government has undertaken a number of major projects in this regard to develop, expand, modernise airports.  The projects include: restructuring of Delhi and Mumbai airport at an estimated cost of Rs 8900 crore and Rs 7000 crore respectively; modernising and expansion of Kolkata and Chennai airports and construction of new greenfield airports at Hyderabad and Bangalore at a cost of Rs 2480 and Rs 1930 crores respectively which would be opened in 2008.
Other airports to come up include greenfield airports at Pekyong, Sikkim (Rs 320 crore), Navi Mumbai and Mopa (Goa).
The minister also said modernising of select 35 non-metro airports have been undertaken at an estimated cost of about Rs 5000 crore.  The modernisation process of these 35 non-metro airports is expected to be completed by March 2010.
The new airports, the minister said, would come up through state government help at Vishakhapatnam, Shimoga, Bijapur, Gulbarga, Hassan and Karwar, Kannur, Chennai, Itanagar and Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh; Chiethu in Nagaland; Pekyong in Sikkim and Kokrajhar in Assam.