Twenty years ago, India had only 50 airports with regularly scheduled service, according to statistics from the Airports Authority of India. By 2014, the number had grown to 74. By 2023, the number had doubled, to 148. Sometime in the 2030s, it is expected to double again.
Even more extraordinary than the number of airports, however, is their architecture. Whether one considers the Hindu symbolism designed into the airport in the pilgrimage city of Varanasi, up north, or the acres of indoor and outdoor waterfalls at Kempegowda Terminal 2 in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), down south, India is building airport infrastructure much more stylish than the anonymous boxes familiar to most air travelers around the world.
Professor Charanjit Singh Shah, who designed the Varanasi terminal, says he always tries to bring local and emotional touches to his work. For his design of the airport at Ayodhya, for example, which is revered as the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram—also called Rama—Shah tried to integrate references from Ram’s story and, as he explains, “translate that in terms of motifs, in terms of artwork, in terms of volumetric analysis, in terms of large stone-cut works, and my signages.”
All of this airport development has happened quickly, driven by the country’s relentless economic expansion. Over the past 20 years, India’s GDP has quadrupled to almost $4 trillion, catapulting it to the fifth-largest economy in the world, ahead of the United Kingdom, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Propelled by that powerful commercial updraft, air travel has climbed, too, from 15 million domestic travelers and 15 million international ones in 2004, according to the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, to 152 million domestic passengers and 64 million international passengers in 2023, according to Reuters.
But the career of Charanjit Shah offers a more human measure of just how rapid this transformation of Indian air travel has been. Although he has practiced architecture for 54 years and is often referred to in the Indian architectural press as “the king of Indian airport design,” Shah actually completed his first airport in the mid-2000s. Two decades later, Shah and his team of 300 have completed 50 projects, and made their mark all over India, not to mention airports as far north as Nepal and as far west as Romania.
Now with sustainability
Although the interest in distinctly Indian motifs remains strong in the country’s airport design, some emphases have changed since the airport boom began 20 years ago.
In the early years, designers aimed mostly for drama, “to make buildings with a wow factor . . . because that was something lacking in India,” says Shah’s son and colleague, Gurpreet Singh Shah, principal architect and urban designer for the Creative Group in New Delhi. He notes, though, that in the past decade, airport developers also learned how to design terminals that required minimal maintenance and were more environmentally sustainable.
Many Indian airports are designed now with sustainability in mind. Terminal 2 of the Kempegowda International Airport, in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), for instance, is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certified and powered with green energy, some of it locally generated.
Other resources are also being carefully conserved. For Kempegowda, Grant Associates, a British landscape architecture firm, designed a sustainable drainage system to collect and conserve rainwater, making the entire 63-acre (25.5 ha) terminal water-positive, despite its extensive gardens.
“The wider airport master plan has been designed to capture, treat, and reuse the rainwater that falls. The terminal and adjacent multimodal transport hub were designed to capture and reuse rainwater that falls within its catchment, and the terminal’s indoor planting and outdoor gardens are designed to utilize that water,” says Andrew Haines, senior associate landscape architect at Grant Associates.
In Noida, Tata Projects is creating runways using a patented material from Nanogence, a chemical additive that reduces cement needs by as much as 20 percent, a dramatic drop in the embodied carbon of a project as massive as an airport.
Apart from an interest in seeing their own culture and heritage in their terminals, Charanjit Shah doesn’t see much difference in what Indian travelers are looking for versus travelers anywhere else. “It’s not that Indians are looking for something very specific,” he says. “No, we are global now.”
Some local conditions are leading to local variations, though. For example, because Indian law now mandates that only ticketed passengers enter the terminal, Peter Lefkovits, a principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), says SOM has included plazas with extensive food and beverage options outside the terminal buildings that the firm has designed in Bengaluru and Mumbai. The plazas give people plenty of room to greet arriving travelers, say goodbye, or just enjoy a meal or an outdoor concert.
Bengaluru’s Garden City
Determined to build an airport that would live up to Bengaluru’s “Garden City” nickname, airport executives commissioned a terminal that would be a “pavillion within a garden,” recalls Andrew Haines, a senior associate at Grant Associates, the lead landscape architects for the project.
The firm translated the airport executives’ vision into a forest belt 300 feet (100 m) wide, around the 2.5 million square foot (255,000 sq m) terminal, a garden of roughly 17 acres (7 ha). The garden is home to 7,900 trees and 100,000 shrubs—more than 3,600 plant species in all, including 96 kinds of lotus alone. The plantings, sourced from many habitats, showcase the country’s rich ecological diversity. Just in going from check-in to security, a traveler walks past some 450,000 individual plants, according to Haines.
“The idea was simply that, from the moment you stepped out of your car to the moment you got on the plane, you were meant to be immersed in landscape in different forms and experiences,” says SOM’s Lefkovits.
To frame those gardens, SOM incorporated local, natural materials, including bamboo, locally sourced granite, and locally baked brick. The project required extensive discussions with engineers to ensure that the skylights met the needs of the plants and that the structure could support the plants’ weight. “It took a lot of collaboration and close coordination,” Lefkovits says.
For the traveler, the result of all this work is an unusually calm transit hub. “When you walk in, it’s silent . . . . All you hear is gentle water in the background, and it kind of echoes down . . . from the orientation garden, into the check-in [area],” Haines says. “But smell is equally important . . . . You’ve got this heady mix, as you arrive, of night-scented plants, as well as daytime-scented plants.”
Public/private partnerships
Public/private partnerships (PPPs) have served as an important catalyst in the growth of airports in India. Instead of having to wait for federal, state, or municipal financing, airport developers have been able to access private capital via a PPP, a proposition that has attracted some of the country’s largest industrial conglomerates, including the Adani Group, one of India’s largest businesses that has been involved in major infrastructure projects—ports, airports, and renewable energy.
Such partnerships have combined private capital and private-sector managerial efficiencies with governmental shepherding of regulatory approvals and coordination of other transportation infrastructure, such as metro rail extensions.
The initial land transaction is long-term leaseholds rather than a sale generally speaking. The operator’s concession rights are typically for 30 years, with a provision to extend the deal for another 30 years, according to experts at JLL, the global real estate consultancy. In most of these contracts, the state government retains a 13 percent share of a project and the central government likewise retains a 13 percent share. Government agencies generally contribute the land and expedite approvals, reducing uncertainty for the operating investor.
Overall, PPP financing seems to have worked well. “The regulatory regime has been so successful and the traffic has grown so well that I don’t think anybody has any hesitation in India about financing airport infrastructure development,” says Satyaki Raghunath, chief operating officer of Kempegowda International Airport. “I think every bank will line up to finance you at this point.”
Despite PPPs’ being much more efficient than the previous process, delays remain. The most common of them relate to land acquisition by the government. “What they have committed to may not come as [the timeline indicates],” says Girish K.S., Bengaluru-based senior director and India head of valuation at JLL, “but the government almost always delivers eventually.”
For the airport architect, having a PPP as a client is a different proposition than a government-owned development. “When you work with government clients, you know that it is more about how you will create a good experience, at cost,” says Creative Group’s Gurpreet Shah. “But when you are working with a private client, you know you have to make a great experience at a very, very reasonable cost.”
The aims are different for a private client. “A private client is not looking at a facility that he’s creating as [being] a monument for the nation,” explains Gurpreet Shah. “He is creating a facility, which will give him an end product as well, so the architect has to be much more sensitive in terms of return on investment.”
Facial recognition
The new airports are pushing technological limits, too. In Bengaluru, the actual process of moving through the terminal is less stressful than the typical airport experience because a biometric identity program eliminates the need to show a boarding pass. “Your face is your boarding pass. From entry to the airport, all the way through to boarding, you can just use your face, and the system will allow you through,” explains Kempegowda’s Raghunath.
Developed at the Bengaluru airport and now in use at eight Indian airports, the facial recognition system is set to be implemented at 18 Indian airports by year’s end, “which means we will probably have the largest biometric travel program in the world,” Raghunath says.
These kinds of changes are encouraging Gurpreet Shah to design with adaptability in mind. Because airport processes continue to evolve, he says, “There has to be a certain level of flexibility in terms of planning and in terms of design.”
Such improvements constitute good news for the airport operator, in Gurpreet Shah’s view: “If your processes are more mechanized . . . the design then evolves from a process-oriented design towards a design, which is making more dollar value to the [investor].”
Infrastructure development
India’s central government has made infrastructure development a key part of its economic program. One indication of the importance of airport development is that, on March 10 of this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi virtually inaugurated or physically laid the foundation stones for 15 airports throughout India.
The central government plans to invest approximately $12 billion over the next two years.
Much of the next round of airport network expansion is slated for the country’s Tier 2 cities, such as Amritsar, Jaipur, and Kochi, which have metropolitan populations between 1 million and 4.5 million; many are typically 180 miles (300 km) to 250 miles (400 km) away from a major Tier 1 city.
Such projects are part of a larger central government initiative to strengthen the country’s infrastructure, particularly with regard to Tier 2 city connections, according to Jerry Kingsley, head of strategic consulting for JLL in Chennai. This process should foster more tourism, including religious pilgrimages, as well as easier connections with business units that large companies are setting up in smaller, less congested cities.
Kingsley does not see this priority changing anytime soon: “We are definitely going to see continued investment in infrastructure, and when we say ‘infrastructure,’ [it] includes a lot of smaller towns.”
Not that the big towns are stopping. In Bengaluru, for instance, a third terminal—a mirror-image of Terminal 2—is to open in 2030, raising annual capacity from 35 million travelers to about 80 million.
Even then, room for growth still exists. Some forecasters expect India’s domestic traffic to double by 2030 (when it reaches 300 million domestic passengers). International travel is projected to more than double by then (reaching 160 million international passengers), which will nevertheless amount to fewer than a third of India’s 1.4 billion people.
As impressive as all those numbers might seem, however, Raghunath insists that we are still in early days for Indian airports. “I think we’re still in Version 1, 1.5, or even just about to Version 2 of what Indian airports could be,” he says.
