Nov. 22—Uttar Pradesh will soon become the only state in India to have five international airports following the groundbreaking and foundation-laying ceremony for the Noida International Airport on November 25, the state government said in a press release.
According to the release, the achievement took less than five years. The state government also said in the release that the GatiShakti National Master Plan launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this month "infused a sense of urgency into the plans for infrastructure development in the state."
The Noida International Airport (NIA), which is coming up in Jewar in Gautam Buddh Nagar of the National Capital Region (NCR), is slated to be India's largest. The airport is located 72km from the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, 40km from Noida and about 40km from the multi-modal logistics hub at Dadri.
The Noida International Airport is also going to have multi-modal connectivity due to its proximity to the existing Yamuna Expressway and the Eastern Peripheral Expressway and will also be linked to Delhi-Mumbai Expressway at Ballabhgarh in Haryana's Faridabad district.
The airport will also be connected to Noida via the Metro as well as the proposed Delhi- Varanasi high-speed rail airport terminal.
The other aspects of the Noida International Airport are its ability to serve more than 12 million passengers a year, which will later be expanded to 70 million passengers by the end of Phase 4, according to the release.
The airport will be expanded after every phase depending on the passenger growth and traffic and is expected to be completed in the next 36 months.
According to the release, the work on the international airport in Ayodhya is in full swing with services slated to start early next year.
While there were only two international airports in the state until 2012—Lucknow and Varanasi—Uttar Pradesh currently has 8 operational airports and 13 airports and 7 airstrips are being developed.
The Lucknow, Varanasi, Kushinagar, Gorakhpur, Agra, Kanpur, Prayagraj and Hindon airports handle commercial flights
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