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Adani Highest Bidder To Manage Five Airports

Adani Group emerges the highest bidder to manage five non-metro airports in partnership with the AAI.

Passengers wait to board a flight at an Airport in Bengaluru, India. (Photograph: Anirudh Saligrama/BloombergQuint)
Passengers wait to board a flight at an Airport in Bengaluru, India. (Photograph: Anirudh Saligrama/BloombergQuint)

The Adani Group emerged as the highest bidder to manage five non-metro airports under a public private partnership with the Airports Authority of India.

The winning bid will be decided on the basis of the highest monthly per passenger fees quoted by the bidder, according to a media statement by the AAI. The fee will be payable to the state-run airports manager.

While the government approved proposals for operation, management and development of six airports in Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram and Mangaluru, financial bids opened for five—excluding Guwahati— on Feb. 25 at 11 a.m. Billionaire Gautam Adani-controlled infrastructure conglomerate bid the most, the AAI said.

The airports management business will help the group enhance growth, a spokesperson at Adani Group said in a written response to BloombergQuint’s queries. “We would be aiming to scale up the infrastructure to bring these facilities on a par with global standards,” it said.

The winning bids, PTI reported earlier, will be announced on Feb. 28. The bids were sought through an open international competitive bidding process, after the government cleared a proposal for managing the airports on a public-private partnership basis in November.