Aviation hubs planned

The Government gave its nod to a wide ranging policy to create international and regional aviation hubs in the country in the coming days to cater to the growing passenger traffic.
As creation of a hub requires establishment of facilities like immigration, customs, provisions for visa-on-arrival and foreign exchange involving various ministries, an inter-ministerial committee would be created to facilitate the setting up of such hubs in major cities.
An aviation hub is an airport, which is used as an intermediate point to transfer air travellers from their original destination to their final destination. In aviation parlance, this is called ‘hub-ands-poke’ operation.
The policy, approved on Thursday, not only focuses on developing global hubs in India but also on establishing domestic regional hubs to cater to the growing air traffic from non-metro destinations in remote areas, including the North East, official sources said.
India should take advantage of its geographical and locational suitability for foreign carriers connecting Europe to Southeast Asia or vice versa, official sources said, adding creating ultramodern airports to cater to rising global traffic would have to be a top priority.
Simultaneously, the government has been according high priority to provide air connectivity to remote, difficult and interior areas of the country and focusing on building and modernising airports in tier-II and tier-III cities.Such connectivity would have to be customer-friendly and, therefore, affordable for passengers and lower cost of operation for the airlines, the sources said, adding the Airports Authority of India has also been looking at developing low-cost airports in smaller cities and towns.
The prime instruments to facilitate air connectivity to these areas are the route dispersal guidelines (RDG) and the aircraft acquisition policy. The RDG makes it mandatory for all domestic carriers to operate a certain percentage of their total flights to remote places, which were financially not viable. Besides Northeast, the areas identified were Jammu and Kashmir and Andaman and Nicobar islands.