Mumbai Unclogged

For decades, India’s financial capital has run its skies like a high-wire act. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, hemmed in by dense urban sprawl, has operated with effectively a single main runway while handling around 950 flights every 24 hours - among the highest traffic intensities anywhere in the world. Delays became routine, expansion appeared impossible, and the costs of congestion were borne quietly by passengers, airlines and the wider economy. That Mumbai, a city that prides itself on scale and ambition, should have muddled through for so long with just one functional airport came to look less like resilience than a planning failure set in concrete.

The opening of the Navi Mumbai International Airport changes that calculus. Few Indian infrastructure projects have been awaited with quite as much impatience and scepticism as the. NMIA. With its inauguration, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) is no longer a one-airport city pretending to be a global hub. By adding fresh capacity and eventually, a second runway, Navi Mumbai promises to provide room to grow.

The need for such airport has long been obvious. Mumbai’s hinterland has shifted eastwards and southwards, with Navi Mumbai, Panvel and Raigad emerging as residential and industrial magnets. India’s aviation market, meanwhile, is expanding faster than almost anywhere else, driven by rising incomes and aggressive low-cost carriers.

That is not to say the new airport arrives fully formed. Early travellers complained of confusing signage, unfinished approach roads and an over-reliance on app-based cabs. For passengers from central Mumbai, the 35-km journey to the NMIA can feel like a test of faith, particularly when public transport links remain skeletal. Such teething troubles are hardly unusual.

Still, the strategic logic is sound. Developed by Adani Airports Holdings in partnership with Maharashtra’s CIDCO, NMIA is among India’s largest greenfield airport projects. When fully built out, it is designed to handle up to 90 million passengers a year, thus placing it among Asia’s bigger hubs. More importantly, it allows Mumbai to think like a two-airport system by redistributing traffic, specialising routes and easing pressure on a dangerously saturated airspace.

There is also symbolism in the details. Aviation professionals have already shortened the airport’s identity to “Navi” in radio calls - a small linguistic shift that signals acceptance.

Sceptics will worry about monopolies, tariffs and the growing footprint of one conglomerate across India’s airports. Those concerns deserve scrutiny. But they should not obscure the broader point that Mumbai’s stagnation in aviation was becoming a drag on India’s economic ambitions. A city that handles finance, film and trade cannot afford to run its gateways at the edge of failure.

Navi Mumbai International Airport is not yet the world-class hub its promoters promise. It may stumble, irritate and disappoint in its early years. But by finally giving Mumbai a second runway it offers the city some desperately needed breathing space, both on the ground and in the skies above.