[Assam] NRI money built the Cochin International Airport

[Ram Sarangapani]

Bhuban da,

That is a fantastic story. It shows how, as private citizens, we can still
accomplish some of the almost impossible tasks and projects.

Most encouraging.

--Ram


On 8/30/07, BBaruah at aol.com <BBaruah at aol.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
>                                                     ---------------------------------------------------------------
> "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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