In encouraging news coming from the valley, the Srinagar International airport crossed the milestone of 3.5 million passenger footfall per annum.
Taking to Twitter on Tuesday, the Airport Authority of India (AAI) announced the monumental achievement.
“We thank our passengers for reposing faith in us by flying through #SrinagarAirport Our annual traffic is now more than 3.5 million. This helped us in being reinstated as a ‘major’ airport once again by #GoI on Nov 6th this month. Our mission is service with safety” read the tweet.
This is especially praiseworthy as earlier Srinagar airport faced an acute shortage of passengers much like the rest of the airports in the country with a mere 2500 reported in the last year owing to nationwide lockdown.
Similarly, during the peak travel season of April and May, the numbers were dipping on the lower side. However, as the situation improved and air travel resumed, a steep increase in the number of passengers was seen.
As a result, a gazette notification dated October 6th, issued by the Ministry of Civil Aviation, read, “In exercise of the powers conferred by Sub-Section (i) of Section 2 of the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority of India Act, 2008 (No.27 of 2008), the Central Government hereby declares the airport at Srinagar as Major Airport,” the airport’s status was upgraded.
Apart from upgrading the airport’s status, there are myriad of other reasons at play as well which have drastically improved the passenger inflow, such as the decision by the Jammu and Kashmir government to bring down the Value Added Taxes and sales tax on the Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) for airlines operating in J&K region to 1 per cent, thereby leading to cheaper flight operations and cheaper rates of the ticket.
As per the official data, Srinagar Airport handled 1.6 million passengers between April and October this year, which is a record high compared to last year when this number stood at less than 700 thousand passenger footfalls.
With further plans of two new terminals to be established sometime soon at Jammu and Srinagar, unveiled by the union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia during his Kashmir visit, the air traffic is set to be at an all-time high at the airport.