(This story originally appeared in on Sep 26, 2019)

GREATER NOIDA : The upcoming Jewar airport will have six runaways, which would make it the largest airport in India once completed. This was announced by Yamuna Authority CEO Arun Vir Singh on Wednesday. Currently, Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport is the only one in the country to have three runaways.When finished, Jewar airport will also be counted along with two of the largest airports in the world — O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, which is spread over 7,200 acres and has eight runways, and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in the US state of Texas that has seven runways.“Some 5,000 hectares in Jewar is earmarked as an aviation hub in Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority’s (YEIDA) master plan. Everything, including the six runways, will fall within these 5,000 hectares designated for the airport. After completion, Jewar will definitely become India’s largest airport,” CEO Singh said.The formal announcement by YEIDA comes more than six months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at an event in Greater Noida that Jewar would become the country’s biggest airport and “all the formalities for it are being completed”. CEO Singh said the state civil aviation director Surya Pal Gangwar directed him on Tuesday to expedite proposals pertaining to extending the two proposed runways of Jewar airport to four and eventually six.YEIDA will now hire PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to prepare a feasibility report. “The UP government has directed me to begin the study and submit a report on the matter at the earliest. I will ask PwC to conduct the feasibility study,” he added.However, Shailendra Bhatia, the nodal officer for Noida International Airport Limited that’s spearheading the project, said, “While Jewar airport is expected to start operations with two runways in the first phase by 2022-23, building additional runways is a component of the subsequent phases, which will start after phase 1 is commissioned.”In its Vision 2040 report, the Indian Civil Aviation ministry had said, “The national capital with 66 million passengers in fiscal 2018-19 is now the seventh largest airport in Asia. It will see a significant growth when its fourth runway and fourth terminal are commissioned in three to four years.”And according to CEO Singh, YEIDA’s airport traffic projections for next 30 years indicate 50-70 million passengers by 2050 from areas such as neighbouring Haryana, Delhi, Ghaziabad and Noida. “Hence, it’s best if Jewar is equipped to deal with air traffic and passenger pressure of the future,” he said.“With the Delhi-Mumbai airports already reaching saturation points, Jewar will be the next big airport to take the load off these aviation hubs,” Singh added.