AAI suffers losses on 93 airports

The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has been incurring losses on 93 of its airports, even as the state-owned agency plans to build and operate 50 low-cost airports in the country in the next few years. The overall plan, according to the latest Economy Survey of the newly-elected BJP government, is to build 200 budget airports in the next 20 years. It runs a total of 125 airports in the country. For 2012-13, AAI's loss stood at Rs.1,547 crore on airports such as Amritsar, Aurangabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Varanasi and Bhopal apart from many small ones, according to the latest government figures. The loss was up 41% over the previous year.
Overall, AAI made a net profit of Rs.738 crore for the financial year ` 2012-13, but that was because of . 935 crore worth of shared revenue from privatised airports such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The figures for FY14 weren't available, but sources said AAI would have incurred a loss last year as well. Some of these 93 airports are on AAI's account even though no airline operates flights to them.Others have suffered a loss in traffic due to capacity cuts by the carriers. Growing losses have forced India's airlines to decrease flights and even drop cities from their network. Their financial condition has also left little room for them to experiment with new air routes and destinations.