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Shortly after CM Yogi finalised the airport’s logo and design, biscuit brand Priyagold set up its manufacturing facility in Jewar—a 953.39 crore investment.

A board outside the construction site for Haldiram's and Bikanervala foods in Sector 30 | Tine Das | ThePrint — A board outside the construction site for Haldiram’s and Bikanervala foods in Sector 30 | Tine Das | ThePrint

Every second sentence uttered by people in Greater Noida these days has the word ‘airport’ in it. It is the connecting word of their aspiration now, the crown jewel of Uttar Pradesh’s development mantra. Countless flex boards flap in the wind on a drive toward Jewar with the unmistakable image of an aircraft taking off.

“No matter what, Yogi ji will make sure at least one flight takes off in 2024 before (the Lok Sabha) elections,” said Pawan Sharma from Rohi village, which was acquired by the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA)

Called the ‘logistics gateway’ of Northern India, there is now a race to be the early bird investor in this National Capital Region (NCR) suburb. From Bikanervala to Kent RO to Avery Dennison, many businesses are lining up to profit off the new Gold Rush.

The sense of anticipation in Jewar, roughly 100 kilometres from Delhi, is palpable. Everyone, from families running local businesses to industries, are waiting for ‘development’ and the wealth it will usher in.

Nearly 17 years after the idea of Jewar airport was first floated in 2001 by then-UP chief minister Rajnath Singh, construction has begun in what is slated to be the fourth-largest airport in the world, triggering a buying spree.

Rising opportunity

From Vivo to LuLu, investors are queuing up to fund projects in Noida, Greater Noida and Jewar.

Six months after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath approved the design and logo for Jewar airport in December 2020, Surya Global, owner of the popular Indian biscuit brand Priyagold, started the construction of its manufacturing facility in August 2021. It has invested Rs 953.39 crore in an area of 38.10 acres. Restaurant chain Bikanervala also set up shop in the same area, Sector 32, roughly 10 km from the airport. It has invested Rs 160.27 crore for a 25-acre plot of land. Construction work on the facility began in January this year.

While approvals came in some time ago, the definitive news that the airport will be operational by 2024 became the catalyst for the construction process,” said Vinay Gupta, chief managing director at Bikanervala.

The packaging and labelling company, Avery Dennison, which has invested Rs 231 crore has already started manufacturing while Haldiram’s (Rs 245 crore) will also be setting up a facility in the area.

But the largest investor so far is Vivo, with a whopping Rs 5,200 crore investment in an area spread over 169.5 acres. LuLu Group International, a Middle East-based retail company, announced its export-oriented food and agriculture-produce processing park on 20 acres of land in Greater Noida. The facility is expected to generate 700 jobs and give indirect employment to 1,500 people. LuLu Group plans to invest Rs 2,500 crore in Uttar Pradesh. While two malls will open in Prayagraj and Varanasi, the third will be in Greater Noida, closer to the airport.

This flurry of investments has given an impetus to other sectors as well. Rajkiya Mahavidyalaya, the region’s first co-educational college, will start holding classes from the end of August. Students from Jewar will no longer have to travel to Bulandshahr, Ghaziabad, Meerut, or Delhi for higher education.

Ready to take on Gurugram

For decades, Noida has been seen as the less endowed sibling of Gurugram (formerly Gurgaon); the absence of an airport was a sore point. Delhi’s Aerocity itself is the by-product of the lucrative space near the airport. But Noida and Greater ‘Noidavaasis’ have their hopes pinned on the upcoming airport— it is their golden goose. Conglomerates are investing as much as Rs 5,000 crore in Jewar.

“Noida has competed with Gurugram as the premier suburb of Delhi with one hand tied behind its back. Even though it has better infrastructure and access to Delhi, corporates and MNCs [multi-national corporations] always preferred Gurugram due to its proximity to the Indira Gandhi International Airport. Over the next few years, this differential will disappear,” said Pankaj Bajaj, president, Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (CREDAI), NCR.

People are holding on to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of the prosperity this airport will bring to the region. At the foundation stone laying ceremony in November 2021, Modi said it would make the region the ‘logistics gateway’ of northern India and provide new employment opportunities to thousands of people.

Employment is a distant dream

So far, employment opportunities for locals have yet to open up, and thousands line up for the few jobs available to them. At the makeshift Tata office on the airport construction site, there’s a snaking queue of job aspirants, all hoping to become security guards. At present, the only available jobs are those of site engineers, construction workers, electricians, security guards, and drivers.

“I completed my Bachelor’s last year and need a job,” said Akhil Singh, who lives in the vicinity of the RR Site–the place Rohi village was relocated to after land acquisition.

While jobs are not easily available, Chaudhary, the real estate dealer, sees this as an opportunity for entrepreneurship. He realised the airport would need a steady supply of ready-mix cement and started his own venture, Jewar RMC Infrastructures Private Limited, to supply all the construction work that started. He, too, prefers not to hire locals, and instead chooses labourers from far-off places who will not be ‘distracted’ by family living close by.

But people in Jewar and nearby areas are waiting for the promised boom. If the airport is the golden goose, then the conglomerates and chains setting up houses in their backyard will lay the golden egg.

BACKED BY THE UPCOMING NOIDA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT IN JEWAR, INDIA’S NORTHERN REGION IS ALL SET TO EMERGE AS AN AVIATION POWERHOUSE WHOSE IMPACT WILL BE FELT FAR AND WIDE

CHAPTER 1 RELOCATION

A few years ago, Rohit Tomar left his cushy job with a Vietnam-based airline and founded a consultancy with his wife Veena. Tomar picked Mumbai, his city of birth and one of India’s primary aviation hubs, for the headquarters of his firm Caladrius Aero. However, this March, the Tomars decided to shift to Greater Noida in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR). “Delhi-NCR has more opportunities in aviation. Most of the country’s major airlines are now based here. With the completion of the upcoming airport in Jewar, the region will have two international airports within two hours of each other. Also, a lot of work in the development of a drone industry is happening, especially in Noida and its surrounding areas, due to the push being given to it by the Uttar Pradesh (UP) government,” he tells Business Today. Tomar is not alone—he can count at least five other people in his professional circle who have shifted from metros like Mumbai and Bengaluru to Delhi-NCR in the past two years.

To Tomar’s point, India’s largest airline IndiGo is based out of Gurugram, which also houses the headquarters of Jet Airways (originally founded in Mumbai). After buying Air India, the Tata group is looking to synergise its aviation assets—AirAsia India, Vistara, Air India Express and Air India SATS, the ground handling supplier—under one roof in Gurugram.

Clearly, Delhi-NCR is fast turning into a powerful aviation hub. The commencement of work on the much-delayed Noida International Airport (NIA) at Jewar, UP, is expected to cement this trend. “All aviation majors, including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), airlines, training facilities, warehousing and logistics firms, and aviation insurance firms, have their presence here. It will be the next aviation capital of India,” predicts Pulak Sen, Founder Secretary General, MRO Association of India, and a long-time Mumbai resident who shifted to Ghaziabad in Delhi-NCR a few years ago. “NIA has been designed keeping in mind future expansion. Once the project comes up, activities such as warehousing and logistics, maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), and others will develop around it. As the airport has been planned in recent times and occupies a large land parcel, it will take a very long time to get saturated,” says Sen.

On completion by the last quarter of 2024, NIA will become one of the largest aviation hubs in the Asia-Pacific. With 12 entry points, the 400,000-sq. m passenger terminal can handle 12 million passengers annually, which can be expanded to handle 30 million passengers. A second terminal, once constructed, will take that capacity to 70 million. Currently, India’s biggest airport, the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, has a capacity to handle 60 million passengers annually. NIA will also be India’s first net-zero emissions airport.

Land acquisition for the first phase is largely completed. “Nothing will derail the construction progress. We’ve completed about 70 per cent of the boundary wall. We’re working hand-in-hand with the UP government, and we continue to make steady progress,” says Christoph Schnellmann, CEO of the project’s concessionaire, Yamuna International Airport Pvt. Ltd (YIAPL), a 100 per cent subsidiary of Flughafen Zürich. YIAPL has selected Tata Projects as the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for the project. It will construct the terminal, runway, airside infrastructure, landside facilities and other ancillary buildings at the site.

Nothing will derail the construction progress. We’ve completed about 70 per cent of the boundary wall. We’re working hand-in-hand with the UP government, and we continue to make steady progress.

CHRISTOPH SCHNELLMANN

CEO Yamuna International Airport Pvt. Ltd (YIAPL).

CHAPTER 2 THE BEGINNINGS

Jewar, about 87 km from the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) in Delhi, was once amongst the most backward regions of UP. Metalled roads were largely absent and one had to drive through Faridabad in neighbouring Haryana to reach villages in the area. Villagers recall how, 30 years ago, they had to wake up at 4 am and spend up to four hours to reach work in Delhi. Today, it takes less than an hour on the six-lane Yamuna Expressway.

Like India’s unpaved village roads, the road to the airport was filled with obstacles. The project was cleared in 2003 by the then NDA government as Taj International and Aviation Hub, and was expected to be completed by 2007-08. The plan was shelved with the change of guard at the centre after the GMR Group claimed that a second airport in the NCR would adversely impact traffic and revenues at IGIA, which it operated. In 2010, the Bahujan Samaj Party government in UP tried to revive the project. The villagers’ agitation that followed the state government’s drive to acquire land along the Yamuna Expressway according to a British-era law ultimately resulted in the central government enacting the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. The law seeks to pay the affected a compensation of four times the market value of their land in a rural area, and two times in an urban area.

One person who played a key role in reviving the project was Dr Mahesh Kumar Sharma, the BJP lawmaker from Noida, as the Union minister of state for civil aviation (2014-2016). “During a discussion with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi, I submitted to him that if cities like New York and Washington DC could have three airports each, why couldn’t the Delhi-NCR have one more airport?” reminisces Sharma, a qualified physician. Besides Jewar, sites in Bhiwadi (Rajasthan), Rohtak (Haryana) and Agra (UP) were also considered. “After all the feasibility studies were completed, I managed to convince Akhilesh Yadav (then UP chief minister) that an airport in Jewar wouldn’t only be more viable, but also a win-win proposition for both the state and centre,” he says.

In 2018, the Noida International Airport Co. Ltd was formed to handle aspects like bidding and project management. The state administration then explained the benefits of the project to farmers, who were reluctant to hand over their land. “I told them that it was with great difficulty and after a very long wait that our area would have a transformative infrastructure project. Once the farmers were convinced of the developments that the project would lead to, they came on board,” says Dhirendra Singh, the MLA from Jewar.

So it was that on November 25, 2021, the PM laid the foundation stone for the project in a public ceremony that attracted thousands of excited villagers, especially women, who turned up in hordes, singing popular folk songs. “NIA will help drive economic growth and job creation in the region. The airport partners will directly employ 4,000-5,000 men and women from the region. The project will also help create thousands of job opportunities indirectly,” says Schnellmann. Already, the project partners are examining ways of offering work to locals during the construction phase.

CHAPTER 3 AEROTROPOLIS

A new concept in urban planning, an aerotropolis is a city whose infrastructure, land use and economy are centred around an airport, which provides fast connectivity to different parts of the world. In the age of Industry 4.0, an aerotropolis will prove to be a disruptor. “The biggest disruption could be in the use of technology in design, operation and data management, which could influence consumer behaviour and customer experience for passengers, airlines or service providers, and redefine cost and efficiency of operations for aero or non-aero businesses,” says an aviation expert requesting anonymity.

NEHA SINGH,
Associate Partner,
Link Legal

Then, even as Singapore became the preferred gateway for trade in Asia over the past 15 years, India is poised to become a part of the next growth gateway. “Airports and seaports are critical infrastructure to provide a fulcrum for gateways and we have seen the success of the symbiotic aggregation between such critical infra in the Middle-East and the rest of Asia,” observes Tomar. “Across India, there has never been such a large-scale greenfield airport project. The growth in domestic trade has been propelled [so far] by leveraging the existing airport infrastructure. NIA is truly an opportunity for Indian aviation and trade to take a step towards becoming a global gateway.”

Compared to other airports in India , NIA has two advantages, according to Tomar. First, its location in one of the highest consumption states and abundance of skilled manpower with connectivity to key transport gateways within India provides a significant advantage to manufacturers, logistics players and multi-modal aggregators. Second, the greenfield development has been conceptualised in terms of ‘design to sustain’ rather than ‘design to optimise’. “In the case of design to sustain, the principles of design are focussed on building sustainability under high-growth environments and offer significant room to grow the business over several years,” says Tomar.

READYING FOR TAKE-OFF:
An artist’s rendition of the Noida International Airport

In NIA’s case, the first phase of 1,334 hectares will be followed by the second phase on a similar-sized land parcel, for which land acquisition has already started. For subsequent phases, another 5,000 hectares are proposed to be acquired. By the end of the concession period for Flughafen Zürich in 2060, the number of runways at NIA is planned to expand to six, and passenger traffic in excess of 70 million annually. “Considering the size of the Indian consumer market, the project has the potential to transform into the largest aviation logistics hub in Asia-Pacific,” says Neha Singh, Associate Partner at law firm Link Legal. Current logistics hubs like Hong Kong, Doha and Japan are definite competitors. But NIA is an important development in the Indian aviation landscape. Some big-ticket projects that are proposed include an international film city, a medical devices park, and a multimodal logistics cluster.

Several initiatives are afoot towards ensuring multi-modal connectivity. Work will start on the interchange to connect Yamuna Expressway to the airport site. This is part of the 56-km Faridabad-Noida-Ghaziabad (FNG) Expressway that will also be connected to Gurugram. The UP government is looking at building a 29-km metro line to connect Jewar with the Noida Metro. Meanwhile, the Delhi Metro Rail Corp. is studying the feasibility of connecting NIA with IGIA through a 72-km-long line. Jewar is proposed as one of the stations on the planned Delhi-Varanasi bullet train project. In addition, the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) is keen to have a corridor connecting the airport to the under-construction Delhi-Meerut semi-high-speed line.

CHAPTER 4 WAREHOUSING & LOGISTICS

Another key area is warehousing and logistics. NIA recently invited proposals for the development of an integrated cargo terminal and warehousing and logistics zone. “We expect cargo capacity of over 200,000 tonnes per year when the facility opens and expect it to grow up to 1.7 million tonnes by 2040,” estimates Schnellmann. NIA envisages the operation of large and wide-bodied passenger aircraft, smaller business jets, and freighters. The seamless movement of passenger traffic—including coverage of last-mile connectivity—by building a multimodal transport hub would be integral to providing long-term value. “Similarly, the integration of the cargo terminals with highly efficient and International Air Transport Association-approved warehouses and systematic cohesion of truckers and freighters, rail and maritime transport would be equally significant for the growth, development and efficiency of a very challenging cargo and logistics sector,” says Link Legal’s Singh.

NIA, which is proposed to be a multimodal logistics and transport hub, is likely to transform the supply chain landscape in north India over the next five to six years. “With the emergence of the greenfield airport, the demand for land for manufacturing and warehousing sectors will surge,” says Bhupindra Singh, MD, North India, Colliers. With state support, the NIA would also address newer catchments and offer a cost advantage for shippers and cargo handlers. “The operationalisation of the airport would provide an alternative to the ever-increasing warehousing and logistics demand in the NCR. Regions such as Noida, Ghaziabad and Greater Noida may see increased development activity of modern warehouses,” says Raaja Kanwar, Chairman & MD of logistics group Apollo International.

“The Delhi-NCR will house 38 million people over the next five years. The current airport and cargo capacities are full. So, NIA will be a solid addition to the sector,” says J.B. Singh, Director at B2B logistics player MOVIN, a JV between InterGlobe Enterprises and UPS. “It will be a great asset for airlines to support express services connecting commercial centres in the north to the rest of India, and potentially serve as an international hub for South Asia.”

Apart from traditional cargo, there is the rapidly growing e-commerce segment. “This requires the service providers to continually adapt to efficient and transparent practices, as it involves the consumer directly who is looking for speed, visibility and predictability,” says Link Legal’s Singh. E-commerce firms like Amazon and Flipkart continue to sign up large leases to cater to increasing demand. “The new airport will boost air cargo capacity in the region. Improved road connectivity between Jewar, Western UP and Haryana will make distribution into UP, Rajasthan and the rest of north India much easier and faster,” says Manju Dhawan, Co-founder, Ecom Express.

Early birds are lining up in Jewar airport Gold Rush. Vivo, Lulu to Bikanervala