Gujarat plans Rs 1,000 crore Dholera airport project to compete with Dubai Airport

Government of Gujarat is expecting new airport in an ancient port of Dholera in the state to take on Dubai as one of the most admiring global hub. It is well known fact that Rs 1,000 crore projects has been actively backed by the Modi government and has been envisaged when Modi was CM of Gujarat, said by General Manager, Dholera International Airport, a state-run company.

Dholera is located in Gujarat and it is more than 100 kilometers from the state capital of Ahmedabad, which is almost similar distance from one of the other key city Vadodara. As a town Dholera covers more than 920 square kilometers area, but its Wikipedia page claims it will be developed into a megacity by 2025, which will be six times more than the size of Shanghai, which is the largest city by population in the world. The city Shanghai is spread on an area of 6.340.5 square meters however Dholera’s Wikipedia page doesn’t clarify how it will reach a several multiples of Shanghai’s proportions.

Chavda stated that the Dholera airport will be an alternate to Ahmedabad which will be saturated in the next five years. Now when it comes that why it will better hub than Dubai, so he stated that a Heathrow-Dholera-Singapore flight will entail a distance than is 322 kilometers lesser than a Heathrow-Dubai-Singapore airport. A total of 1,426 hectares area has been selected for the airport site, which can have at-least two runways and the length for these runway can be 000 meters and 2,900 meters, according to its brochure. The brochure ironically sports a picture of one of the terminals at the Dubai airport, lined on one side with Emirates’ planes, which means it still, aiming to beat Dubai as a hub is ambitious.

According to the news of Gulf Airport, London’s Heathrow is one of the busiest airports in the world as it were handled more than 70.48 million passengers in 2014. Airport has four of the multi-level terminals, one which has been built at a cost of $8 billion or approximately Rs 45,000 crore, and three concourse connections between them. It is handling more than 140 airlines connecting to 270 destinations and able to contribute more than $26.7 billion to Dubai’s economy or 27% of its GDP. Currently, Dubai is planning to build a $32 billion second airport with five runways.