[Assam] NRI money built the Cochin International Airport

[BBaruah at aol.com]

Dear\Netters

Reproduced below is a short article published in today’s Financial  Times 
(Aug 30,‘07) minus the  picture of a plane with passengers  at  the airport.  I 
hope very much that it will stimulate interest in all  directions.
 
bhuban
                                                    
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"Migrant money opens up another passage to India"
 
Non-residents played a crucial role in enabling the southern state of  Kerala 
to build an International airport, writes Joe Leahy
 
E M Babu  remembers only too well what life was like in the early  1990s, 
before he and a group of other overseas Indians working in the Middle  East 
helped fund a new international airport in Kerala, the lush green state at  India’s 
southern tip.
 
At that time, the flight from Dubai to Kerala was routed through Mumbai,  
with domestic connections to the state’s colonial era capital, Cochin, departing  
the next day.. What is today a four-hour flight was an overnight ordeal.
 
For the Keralites, who speak a regional language, Mumbai felt like a  foreign 
country as Hindi-speaking customs officials rifled through their bags,  
confiscating gifts brought back for loved ones, and rapacious travel agents  
fleeced them on hotel rooms. “For us, the airport was not an investment,  actually 
it was like a dream come true”, says Mr Babu, who runs a business in  Dubai.
 
While most people around the world associate their local airport with  little 
more than the chore of travel, for many overseas Keralites Cochin  
International Airport is as much  a source of regional pride as one of  their state’s 
cultural or historic monuments.
 
The brainchild of an enterprising senior Indian civil servant, V J Kurian,  
it is India’s first privately held international airport and the country‘s 
first  big infrastructure project to harness the wealth of the non-resident 
Indian  community,.
 
“The NRIs  had a very crucial role. If they had not put in the money  and 
taken the risk, this airport would never have been“, says  S Bharath,  the airport
‘s present managing director.
 
Immediately on arrival at Cochin, it is clear that this airport is  
different. The bright yellow paint and decorative Keralan architecture betrays a  pride 
absent from the country’s government built facilities.
 
The airport was incorporated in 1994 when Cochin’s existing navy-owned  
facility, which could cope with only a handful of flights a day and closed at  
dusk, became overloaded. The government of Kerala did not have the money for a  
new airport. So Mr Kurian came up with a plan to fund it entirely through loans  
and donations from the 4m Keralites then working abroad, mainly in the Gulf. 
He  reasoned that if one in five of them lent Rs 5,000 (£60, $122, €89) that 
would  cover much of the cost of the project.
 
The scheme failed - in the end, fewer than 11,000 ovwerseas Keralites put  in 
money - but even then  their involvement provided an important political  
constituency that Mr Kurian could draw on whenever the project ran into  
bureaucratic hurdles.
 
Mr Kurian begged and borrowed more funds, including loans from banks and  
contributions from service providers such as Air India, the ground handling  
agent, in exchange for stock and a share in the revenue. He also invited a group  
of wealthy overseas Keralites such as Mr Babu to invest more in exchange for  
seats on the board.
 
“The whole process was a confidence -building exercise,”  says another  of 
these investors, P Mohammed Ali, who runs a business in Oman. “When the trust  
was created, the rest was automatic.”
 
In 1998 the airport opened at a cost of only Rs 2,830m, a fraction of what  
the government is today investing in airports in Mumbai, Delhi and   Bangalore. 
It is now highly profitable. Passenger traffic grew by more than  one-third 
last fiscal year to nearly 3m and there are plans to build an airport  city 
consisting of golf courses, hotels and business parks.
 
The airport has also helped Kerala become one of India’s premier tourist  
destinations, with foreigners coming in droves to sail in the region’s placid  
tropical waters or try its Ayurvedic medicine.
 
So could the project be replicated? Mr Kurian tried with a plan to set up a  
regional airline, in which he had hoped to deploy the funds of overseas 
Indians,  but the project fell through when he moved to a different job in the civil 
 service.
 
“There are a lot of non-resident Indians, like those in the information  
technology industry, who will invest in government projects but they won’t  invest 
in risky projects”, says Mr Kurian. “It has to be government-led.”
 
Mr Babu goes a step further. Cochin airport provides a good template for  
future projects, he says. But the key is to have a corruption-free, apolitical  
figure in charge, otherwise overseas Indians will stay away. “If you depend 
only  on the politicians, it will never work,” he says.
 
 
 











   
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