NaMu Airport bid: GVK beats GMR

After a delay of one-and-a-half decades, the Navi Mumbai international airport project is finally on track. The GVK-led Mumbai International Airport Ltd won the bid for the Rs.16,000 crore project, offering a 12.6% share in revenue to the nodal agency, Cidco, which is executing the project. The only rival in the fray was GMR Group, which offered 10.44%.

Cidco will now forward the bid to the project management implementation committee, headed by the state chief secretary . The state cabinet will then take a call on finalising the bid. The state is expected to conclude the process by the month-end or early March. MIAL, of which the Airports Authority of India (AAI) is a partner, had earlier redeveloped the domestic and international airport terminals at Santacruz and Sahar and currently operates the Chhatrapati Shivaji international airport.

Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had said last year that the first flight from the airport would take off by the end of 2019, but experts said several issues still needed to be worked out.

The GVK group had been given the first right of refusal by Cidco as they operate the local city airports, and in case their bid came within 10% of the best one, they could still lay claim to the bid.

GVK also won the tender for cutting a portion of the Ulwe hill to make way for the runway .The airport will have two parallel runways, 3.7 km-long each. It will have an aircraft parking capacity of 104.

Tata Realty & Infrastructure and Hiranandani Group, which were earlier in the race and had qualified for the financial bids, did not submit their offers on Monday . The bidding process was delayed for several months because Cidco was forced to twice extend the bids when it failed to attract more bidders.

Tata and Hiranandani had both raised several issues about the timelines and cost overruns. Both the companies also expressed concerns about the consequent impact on the cost of the project and whether the estimates provided by the government were sufficient.

GMR too had complained that more than 3,200 families were yet to be relocated from the site before work starts.

The Navi Mumbai International Airport will be executed on a public-private-participation basis through a proposed special purpose vehicle.While Cidco has designed the airport, GVK will build, operate and transfer the entire project after 30 years. As per Cidco consultants, the passenger count is expected in the first year of operation at 15 million, which will increase to 30 million in 2025 and to 40 million in 2030. The maximum count is pegged at 60 million in 2035.

India's domestic market is on track to surpass 100 million passengers in financial year 2017 alone and will touch 130 million in 2018. From January to December 2016, Delhi handled a total of 55 million passengers (domestic and international included), while Mumbai, the second busiest airport in India, handled 44 million.

UP's Economic Status

IGI enters global list of 15 busiest airports

Indira Gandhi International airport became the 12th busiest airport worldwide for the month of November 2016 as per the latest report released by the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

This was the first time an Indian airport entered the big league of top 15 airports in the world. Delhi airport also recorded the highest growth rate of 19.1% in November 2016 globally.

Delhi International Airport Pvt. Limited officials said this is yet another major achievement for the IGI airport after it crossed the 50 million passenger mark during the same period in November. Last year, Delhi airport handled a record 55.64 million passengers -the highest ever in the country.

IGI airport also reached an average of 1,185 air traffic movements a day, which is another record for the country .

India's 1st startup district

The Centre has decided to promote Dakshina Kannada as India's first startup district. A decision to this effect has received approval from the department of industrial policy and promotion under the Union commerce ministry and Niti Aayog.

The Union ministry of commerce and industry, headed by Nirmala Sitharaman had sent a team to Mangaluru in January to make a preliminary assessment for the startup project. With the minister dropping sufficient hints about promoting Dakshina Kannada as a startup district in the ongoing budget session, a formal official announcement is awaited.

The district will get 20 Atal Tinkering Laboratories in schools with state-of-the-art hardware such as 3D printers and allied software. The programme is being taken up under the Atal Innovation Mission. The labs and incubation centres will come up in five colleges while two institutions will vie for the Centre of Excellence tag in a grand challenge that the ministry will announce soon.

Ashok Jhunjunwala, an IIT-Madras professor who set up the prestigious IIT Madras Research Park, will handhold the entire exercise. There will be a three-tiered approach to foster the culture of innovation. Hence, there are schools, colleges and professional technical institutions lined up for this project with a bottom-up approach. The focus will chiefly be on agriculture, education, health, infrastructure, manufacturing and the Internet of Things. 

Prithvi Defence Vehicle tested

India took a big step towards an operational two-tier ballistic missile defence system by testing a high-altitude interceptor missile to destroy an incoming ballistic missile over the Bay of Bengal on Saturday morning.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation was itself gung-ho about its long-delayed BMD system, claiming it would now be possible to deploy the two-layered missile shield to protect a city or strategic installation in two years.

But it had earlier also promised that New Delhi would get the missile shield, capable of tackling missiles with a 2,000 km strike range, by 2014 at the latest. Scientists, however, say they are confident of achieving the target this time.

The “exo-atmospheric“ (outside the earth's atmosphere) interceptor missile tested on Saturday, also called the PDV (Prithvi defence vehicle), after all, directly hit the target missile at an altitude of 97 km. The test began at 7.45 am with the two-stage target missile, mimicking an enemy ballistic missile, being launched from a ship in the Bay of Bengal.

In the fully-automated operation, with long-range radars continuously tracking the target and feeding data about its trajectory to the mission computers, the interceptor missile was then fired from the Abdul Kalam Island (Wheeler Island), off Odisha coast, around 200 km away .

BMD systems, of course, are highly complex to develop and deploy.

DRDO's experimental two-tier system is designed to track and destroy ballistic missiles both inside (endo) and outside (exo) the earth's atmosphere. A third layer, in turn, is planned to tackle low-flying cruise missiles, artillery projectiles and rockets in line with the overall aim to achieve “near 100% kill or interception probability''.

NaMu Airport: Last & Final deadline

As the “last and final“ deadline for the financial bidding of the Rs.16,000 crore Navi Mumbai airport project ends on Monday, Cidco, the nodal authority for the project, is hopeful of getting more than one bid.

The deadline for financial bidding (Request For Proposal) has been extended thrice for fair play. Four parties made it to the round after clearing the technical bid (Request for quotation).GVK Power and Infrastructure-led Mumbai International Airport Ltd was the lone bidder in the previous two bids. The other three qualified bidders have raised questions about the timeline and cost over runs involved in executing the project.

CVC guidelines mandate minimum two extensions in case of single bid to ensure transparency . Cidco MD, Bhushan Gagrani said he is hopeful of getting more than one bid. He has said that the bid would be closed this time, and in case single bid, it will be forwarded to the state cabinet to take a decision.

The others qualified bidders are GMR Airports Ltd and MIA Infrastructure Pvt.Ltd, Tata Reality and Infrastructure Ltd and Vinci Airports and Voluptas Developers Pvt. Ltd. (Hiranandani Group) and Zurich Airport International (both consortiums).

MIAL has the right of first refusal as per the Airports Authority of India (AAI) that has allowed for the clause of the same party getting a favoured status if the second airport is within to 150 km of the existing airport. It means MIAL's bid is within 10% of the highest bidder then it will get a chance to match the bid and get the project.

The Rs.16,000 crore NMIA will be executed on a Public-­private partnership through a proposed special purpose vehicle with 74 % private equity and 26 % (13% each) by the state government routed through Cidco and AAI. Tata Realty & Infrastructure, Hiranandani Group and GMR Airports had earlier said they needed time to decide till issues linked to resettlement and pre-development work are resolved. For, Cidco, nodal authority for the project, claims that one runway will be operational by 2019 and the entire airport ready the following year.

IIP Contracts: December 2016

Industrial production contracted in December due to a sharp decline in production of consumer goods, confirming a demonetisation-led contraction in demand.

The Index of Industrial Production was 0.4% lower in December from a year ago, well below 5.7% growth in November and consensus expectation of around 1% in December.

The cumulative IIP growth for April-December is 0.3% against 3.2% for the same period last year.

The Purchasing Managers' Index had suggested subdued manufacturing sentiment both in December and January.

The decline is largely due to consumer goods-driven 2% contraction in manufacturing, the largest component of the index. Electricity generation was up by 6.3%, while mining output rose 5.2%.

Lack of cash seems to have dented demand for consumer goods, which spilled over to 6.8% decline in production. Within consumer goods, production of durable goods fell 10.3% from a year ago in December, while that of non-durables or the FMCG goods was down 5%.

Capital goods were lower by 3% in December, confirming subdued investment sentiment.

As many as 17 out of 22 manufacturing sub-sectors re ported contraction in the month of December with office, accounting and computing machinery leading with a 23.9% contraction.

The data provide evidence of a softer second half following demonetisation. The Economic Survey expects FY17 growth to be in the range of 6.5% to 6.75% compared with 7.9% in FY16.

The RBI expects GVA growth in the current fiscal at 6.9% compared with 7% estimated by the Central Statistics Office without factoring in the impact of demonetisation. The central bank has said demonetisation will have a `transient' impact on the economy.

The RBI on Wednesday decided not to cut rates citing upside risk to inflation, disappointing markets that had penciled in a 0.25 percentage points cut.

Banks have lowered interest rates, thanks to the surge in low-cost funds due to demonetisation, and the impact of lower lending rates could be seen on demand within a few months though January is likely to be lacklustre.