BIAL RTI - Steering Committee Meeting Proceedings

Prajagale,

 First off all, many thanks to Ritesh and others for posting this important document that gives an insight into the making of BIAL project and how the BIAL came about. A comprehensive report has been written by KSIIDC MD, Mr Nagesh, which is available on Praja @ http://bangalore.praja.in/blog/rithesh/2009/01/16/bial-rti-airport-development-overview

But still there are many things that is not covered in Mr. Nagesh's report. After going through about 150 pages or so,I felt the need that I should summarized the contents and important points in this post for the benefit of Praja Community and other visitors.

1.  The steering committee consisting of officials from GOK, MoCA, AAI and KSIIDC spearheaded the efforts for the new International airport in Bangalore which was realized in May25, 2008 as BIAL.
2. There were about 17 meetings that took place for the purpose starting From first meeting on June 5, 1999 until 17th meeting on March 7, 2003.
3. All throughout the selection of private partner for the project, IL & FS participated as the external consultant
4. HAL Closure - Initially proposed for limited operation restricting to 52 seater flight traffic, but by September 1999 decided to completely closed for commercial operation and same was approved in-principle by MoCA.
5. Bidding process started with calling for EOI, in which 17 firms participated along 5 other Indian based firms.
6. Only 7 were qualified - ABB, BAA, Schipol, Reliance, Siemens, Bechtel and Hochtief.
7. As the process progressed and actual bids were called, only 2 left in race - Siemens and Hochtief.
8. Siemens topped the bidding and retained as lead bidder. And the rest is the story.
9. During the selection process, for evaluating Airport Development Plan, Initially Airport-de-Paris along with others were considered for vetting the submitted plans.
10. Airport-De-Paris had to be dropped because of objections from Siemens citing they are their competitors and they were indirectly involved in bidding for RGIA airport in H'bad. Committee accepted the Siemens contentions and dropped Airport-de-Paris for vetting process.
11. Many others like HongKong Airport Operators and others were considered but couldn't materialize, finally Sandhawalia was selected as the aviation field expert.
12. In the bidding and evaluation process, IL&FS, Dua&Associates and Mr. Sandhawalia assisted the steering committee in selecting the final winner.They even lead the final negotitaions along AAI & KSIIDC officials in fixing the initial project layout and reasonable project costs. They formed the negotiation team (NT).
13. CA was drafted with cluase for 150 Km exclusivity in September 2002 and approved in-principle by MoCA.
14. Siemens and AAI did the independent costing. AAI's estimates were 40-80% lower than what Siemens quoted. The NT then did a item by item analysis to ascertain the reason for such large deviations. Seems Siemens were successfull in satisfying the NT and their estimates were finally accepted. One reason was the prcatice of Public sector estimates that were usually much lower than what actually gets spent in final analysis.
15. The initial project cost was fixed at 230 US Million Dollars.
16. Mr. Naryan Murthy was allowed to lead the BIAL, which was incorporated in early 2001.

 Rest is the history and we all were witness to the BIAL saga therefater even after its opening in May 2008. There is no parallel to BIAL project, which I think has seen the most opposing views and close scrutiny from public including Praja members.

 In the end I must thank Ritesh and praja community for standing upto Praja's legacy.

 Syed

Thanks for the RTI and the summary.  This document (and this is black and white) shows clearly that the 150km rule came in much earlier than what we have been led to believe.

The other interesting thing to find out will be what changes did BIAL make sometime in 2006 after Praful Patel gave them feedback that their design was in line with growth and also did not have an "international" look.  I know they did add 3 gates (8 vs original 5 planned).

Srivathsa