CBI Report: Kerala airport runway built with sub-standard material; Eight UAE flights land daily

Published Thursday, July 18, 2013

By Joseph George

All passengers flying into Kozhikode beware. You are landing on a runway that was built using substandard material.

It is not just the Karipur International airport, but officials are scrutinizing the construction work on five other airports in India.

The Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI in the US has now come up with a startling revelation that all aircrafts including several international flights taking off and landing in Kerala’s Karipur International Airport (Kozhikide) were in fact operating on a sub-standard runway built by a Delhi based firm.

The same company was involved in the construction ork of the five other airports - Goa, Varanasi, Ranchi, Raipur and Coimbatore – that are currently under investigation.

From UAE alone, eight daily flights land in Karipur, including three each from Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The airport is the seventh busiest airport in the country in terms of international traffic.

According to reports the runway has of late developed several cracks and oficials from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation have even instructed that the airport be partially closed so that repair works can be carried out on the damaged runway.

In fact, the Airport Authority of India had temporarily closed one runway at the airport for maintenance in May this year. This was after the runway was damaged during the take off of a Kozhikode-Jeddah Air India flight.

The CBI which started investigating the case in 2007 based on allegations of corruption, has now filed cases against key officials of Arora and Associates. It also believes that four officials of Airports Authority of India are also involved in the case of accepting kickbacks and allowing the company to compromise on materials used to construct the runway.

According to media reports the actual estimated cost of constructing the runway was Rs23 crores. A total of 4500 tonnes of bitumen was supposed to be used for the construction but the officials actually only used 3700 tonnes of Bitumen. Investigations have also revealed that fake bills worh Rs2.28 crores were used, thereby seriously compromising the quality of runway.

All pics are from a Facebook page on Karipur airport

Non-Resident Indians from Malabar region living in the UAE say they are shocked with this development.

“These people have no value for human lives. All they want is money. They can go to any extent to do that. I have not sen a more corrupt society than India,” says Ismael PL from Kozhikode.

Majority of Keralites who live in the UAE and the Gulf are from the Malabar region.

Traffic Statistics for Calicut/Karipur International Airport for the last 6 Years

	2006-07	2007-08	2008-09	2009-10	2010-11	2011-12
Aircraft Movement (International+ Domestic) (in Numbers)	13,105	15,263	19,432	17,615	16809	16,300
Passenger Movement (International + Domestic) (in Numbers)	11,33,622	13,32,747	16,79,095	18,63,869	20,61,098	22,09,924
Total Freight (International + Domestic) (in Tonnes)	11,461	9,394	12,919	17,500	21,742	25,592