Offshore Bangalore gets international airport boost

The new Indian government has given the high-tech offshore hotspot of Bangalore a boost by signing an agreement for a new $284m international airport in the city.

The government has opted for a public-private partnership model and the greenfield airport will be three-quarters owned by a consortium led by German company Siemens, India's Larsen & Toubro and Unique Zurich airport.

The Indian IT sector in Bangalore's Karnataka state has been pushing for the airport for three years to cope with the influx of western businesses to India's answer to Silicon Valley.

UK executives wanting to go to Bangalore currently have to fly to the ageing Mumbai international airport and then get a connecting one hour internal flight to Bangalore, as silicon.com discovered on a recent fact-finding trip to explore the Indian offshore outsourcing and BPO phenomenon.

Arriving in Mumbai in the early hours of the morning after a long flight is disorienting and, while the existing airport at Bangalore is modern and clean, it is on a similar scale to only the smaller regional airports in the UK.

The airport is likely to be open by 2007, with capacity for five million passengers a year and a four kilometre runway capable of taking the largest Airbus and Boeing 747 planes, although the plans are for an ultimate capacity of 40 million passengers a year.

The Indian minister for civil aviation said in a statement that the upcoming international airport at the other high-tech city of Hyderabad will be done along the same lines as Bangalore.