With blueprint finalised, expansion work of Bagdogra Airport to start from February

Kolkata : With the blueprint being finalised, the full-fledged expansion work of Bagdogra Airport near Siliguri in Darjeeling district in West Bengal will start from next month, sources aware of the development said.

It will begin with the construction of the new terminal building of the airport with a higher passenger capacity than now.

“The tender-acceptance process was completed in November last year and the process for the examination of bids and its finalisation was completed in December. The initial corpus of Rs 883.80 crore for the first phase of expansion is also available and work is all set to start from next month,” a source from the advisory committee of the Bagdogra Airport said.

The first phase of the expansion is expected to be completed in 30 months and the entire project is expected to done by 2029 beginning.

The expansion was necessitated by the fact that the Bagdogra Airport remains overcrowded round the year as its capacity is just 5,000 passengers whereas the daily footfall is around 20,000 passengers.

It is learnt that the processes for inviting tenders for the project started after the acquisition of 104 acres of land. The construction of the new terminal building will be done at a cost of Rs 950.45 crore and the total project cost was estimated at Rs 1,884 crore.

The new terminal building’s area will be one lakh square foot and the expansion work will involve construction of 10 new aerobridges and the work on six of them will be completed in the first phase.