The new international airport in Bangalore may not have opened yet, but industry leaders in India's Silicon Valley are already complaining that it is too small and too far away.
The privately-built airport, which is due to open on Saturday, is about 35 km (22 miles) from the city center, at the end of a road that already routinely gets jammed with traffic. The older state-run airport, closer to the city, is due to close.
"Seventy-five percent of Bangalore's air traffic is business travel, and if it takes four to five hours to get to the airport and come back to the city, how can you do business?" said Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman of Indian biotechnology firm, Biocon.
The Bangalore City Connect Foundation, an association of business leaders in the city, says city authorities should renegotiate with Bangalore International Airport (BIAL), the new airport's owners, and keep the old one open.
Siemens Project Ventures has the majority stake in the airport. Other shareholders include India's Larsen & Toubro, Unique Zurich Airport, the federal government and Karnataka state, of which Bangalore is the capital.
"We need an international-quality airport and we are not saying don't open the new airport, but let's also utilize the infrastructure that is already there," said M. Lakshminarayan, the chairman of Bangalore City Connect.
India's airports are struggling to cope with a boom in the civil aviation sector, which is growing at more than 25 percent a year, mainly due to rapidly rising incomes and the launch of many budget airlines. The government has started awarding contracts to private companies to modernize some of the country's state-run airports that lacked basic facilities and were unable to handle the growing number of passengers.
Overhauling India's creaking infrastructure is an urgent priority as the country grows. But, in Bangalore at least, some worry that privatization has been badly planned.
About 5 million people flew in and out of Bangalore when the government signed the pact with BIAL in 2004. Now the figure is 10 million, and likely to reach 15 million in a couple of years.
"Things have changed dramatically in the last three to four years. We feel the new airport will outstrip its capacity very soon," said T.V. Mohandas Pai, a board member at Infosys Technologies, India's second largest software services exporter.
But Albert Brunner, the chief executive of BIAL, says the new airport can cope.
"We can easily handle 14 million passengers at our airport. So, these allegations are baseless," he said. "Nevertheless, we want to be a world-class airport, and for that reason immediately after the airport opening we go into the next expansion phase."
