As dense cities encircle India’s busiest airports, dangers multiply

Ahmedabad: Bhavesh Patni had just sat down with his family for a lunch of eggplant and potato curry when an Air India plane took off from the runway behind their home in the city of Ahmedabad, flew over their heads and crashed into a medical college campus visible from their building.

As Patni climbed up to his terrace to watch the flames from a disaster that would ultimately kill 241 people on the plane and at least 34 on the ground, he shuddered as he thought about his family’s proximity to the nightmare below them.

In Ahmedabad, as in cities across this country of 1.4 billion people, there is little buffer between the increasingly busy airport and the densely populated neighbourhoods that encircle it. That puts residents in the danger zone if anything goes wrong during takeoffs and landings, the time when most aviation accidents occur.

This reality illustrates a pressing challenge for India. The country’s growing wealth has given it the means to be more on the move. Air passenger traffic has doubled over the past decade, as has the number of operational airports. But India’s expanding aviation ambitions have been superimposed on existing urban infrastructures that are already pushed to the limit by the rapid growth of cities.

“It was only by God’s grace that we survived,” Patni, a cargo handler at the Ahmedabad airport, said days after last week’s crash. As he spoke, rescue workers were still retrieving human remains from the wreckage, and cranes were trying to dislodge the aircraft’s tail from the medical college building’s roof.

Around the world, major airports are increasingly situated far from city centers, in part because such land is cheaper and expansion is easier, and in part to mitigate the health risks of noise and air pollution and the possible dangers of air accidents.

But the airports in India’s biggest cities are some of the most “enclosed” in the world, according to a 2022 study by researchers in Belgium. Mumbai’s airport topped the study’s rankings, and the airports in Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Delhi were among the top 25.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has particularly promoted the growth of air connectivity across the immense country. India, which has doubled the number of its international and domestic airports to over 150 in the past decade, says it plans to increase the number to 350 in the next two decades. With more than 1 million flights and 175 million passengers last year, India was the third-largest air transport market, after the United States and China.

The country’s expanding economy has finally brought in the kind of resources that could lift up its long-neglected infrastructure. Modi’s critics say he has pushed a model of development that prioritizes quick results at the cost of careful planning and execution.

They point to roads and bridges that collapse soon after completion, and to the flouting of basic safety standards. India does not have enough airport officials who understand the minute details that are crucial to ensuring safety, said Yeshwanth Shenoy, a public interest lawyer and activist who has been going to court to try to improve airport safety for more than a decade.

A parliamentary report earlier this year said that there was serious staffing shortage in official bodies that enforce aviation safety standards, including a vacancy rate of more than 50% in the civil aviation authority.

In Mumbai, where the international airport accounts for a quarter of India’s air traffic, there are more than 1,000 buildings that violate safety standards meant to prevent the obstruction of flight paths, Shenoy said.

City authorities admitted in court that hundreds of buildings were obstructions. But since the first demolition orders were given in 2016, only a handful have come down. And hundreds more have been built, Shenoy said.

In the Ahmedabad crash, there has been no indication that buildings were in the way. The plane appeared to have failed to gain sufficient lift after takeoff, and went into a steady descent before crashing less than a mile from the runway. There has also not been any sign of a bird strike, a problem that the airport has struggled with for year

But it has long been clear that there is little cushion around the airport, with packed clusters of modest homes, shops and hotels pressing up against its gates.

“If the airplane had crashed 500 meters earlier, thousands could have died,” said Himmatsingh Patel, a former mayor of Ahmedabad, which is the largest city in the western state of Gujarat.

In Modi’s vision for India’s development, Ahmedabad has a special place as a “model city.” It was there that he tested many of his ideas when he was chief minister of Gujarat, a post he held for more than a decade before becoming prime minister in 2014.

The city’s favored status has continued even after Modi took national office. In 2014, it was on a waterfront in Ahmedabad that he shared a swing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The city is also home to the country’s largest cricket stadium, named after Modi. When President Donald Trump visited India in 2020, Modi took him to a rally at that stadium that was attended by 100,000 people.

Ahmedabad was a very different place when its airport was built in the 1930s. It stood a safe distance of about 10 miles from the old city, Patel said.

Patel, 64, said he remembered joining his family as a child on picnics at the edge of the airport, to watch takeoffs and landings.

Ahmedabad became an international airport in the 1990s. The city’s population had grown along with it; today an estimated 8 million live there, more than double the number two decades ago.

One study found that a tenth of the population was affected by loud noise from air traffic. Many in the neighborhoods around the airport said such noise was routine.

As the airport grew busier, these neighborhoods — where amenities like grain markets and medicine shops sprang up — became highly sought after for jobs.

Vikram Sinh, 60, who lives in a government-owned apartment there and runs a grocery store, was able to put two of his children through medical school with his earnings. Both are now doctors in Canada.

“This is a golden area in all of Gujarat,” he said. “I do not feel like leaving this place.”

The airport currently has over 13 million passengers a year. Its operations were handed over in 2020 to Adani Airport Holdings, part of the empire of Gautam Adani, a billionaire ally of Modi’s. The company signed a 50-year deal with the government.

As it has laid out its plans for the airport’s future, Adani Holdings has described it as “one of the most land-constrained airports in India.” Yet the company aims to expand the airport’s passenger capacity to 18 million annually by next year and to 40 million by 2040.

Patel, who is a member of the opposition Congress party, said the expansion of the existing airport in the middle of Ahmedabad when open land outside the densely-populated city was plenty spoke to a lack of long term planning.

“We do patchwork development,” he said, “not the kind that looks ahead to the next 25 years.”

Dharmendra Shah, a leader of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party in Gujarat, acknowledged the scarcity of available land inside the city. He said authorities would study what caused the crash, but also he stood by the city’s plans.

“According to me,” he said, “the development model of the city is just fine, including the airport’s.”