THE PROJECT FOR modernising the airport facilities in Mumbai and Delhi seems to be hitting more air pockets than an aeroplane flying through the eye of a storm. Now, the Government is saying that it will re-evaluate the technical qualifications set by it for the potential bidders or rectify any mistakes that may have crept into the process leading up to the initial shortlist of such qualifiers.

Of course, policy initiatives in the past, across a broad spectrum of infrastructure investments, have had to encounter stiff opposition for one reason or the other. These were overcome through some deft political manoeuvring. It is in the very nature of democratic discourse on policy alternatives that an initial radical formulation gets diluted, to something that is not only realistic but also more acceptable to a wider section of public opinion. Thus, in the case of national highways, the initial alternative of a parallel infrastructure with `toll' and the right of commercial exploitation of land along the new roads soon gave way to a more modest goal of upgrading the existing carriageways with user levies that would only partially recoup the investment. But if even the relatively more modest goal of modernising the existing infrastructure, as opposed to a `greenfield' facility, has run into problems in the case of Mumbai and Delhi airports, the Government has only itself to blame. It has been obsessed with making sure that only the most credible players enter the fray, ostensibly to avoid any delay in the execution of the project. This obsession, bordering on paranoia, has been responsible for the Government tying itself into knots on some esoteric criterion of what constitutes successful track record of running an airport business when the thousands of crores of rupees that the promoters would invest would have been the best insurance for timely execution and satisfactory operation of the newly-created facilities.

It is ironic that a country that thinks nothing of committing scarce public resources into creating airport infrastructure should balk at entry of private capital ostensibly on the ground of a lack of indigenous expertise. Now, combine this with the vitiated atmosphere in which the administrative apparatus has to function, you have the perfect formula for ensuring that critical infrastructure never gets off the ground. In such a milieu, the bureaucracy has acquired a penchant for playing it safe to a point of inaction in the face of the most frivolous of internal objections and hence needing the lubricant of a certificate of good conduct from an outside expert to get it back into the decision-making mode. If vested interests driven by ideological or pecuniary considerations are also thrown in, the mix becomes all the more glacial.

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