When Ravi Pandey, 39, tried to book a flight between New Delhi and Kushinagar, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, before Chhath, Bihar’s festival of the year, he was surprised to find no flights listed. Hailing from Siwan district in Bihar, Mr. Pandey has been in Noida since 2011. “Kushinagar airport is just about 80 kilometres away from Siwan, and when I checked in August 2023, the route was operational,” he said.
The non-availability was because SpiceJet, which has exclusive rights to fly to the airport, has seen sporadic operations to Kushinagar, particularly since mid-2022 as a large number of its 65 aircraft faced grounding due to maintenance issues.
Like Mr. Pandey, several people from Kushinagar, Deoria, and those from neighbouring areas in Bihar, including Gopalganj and West Champaran districts in Bihar were disappointed when they found flight operations from the airport had been stalled from November 5, during north India’s peak festival season that included Diwali and Chhath.
“Initially SpiceJet cancelled operations between November 5 and November 20. Then they extended cancellation until November 30. They have given operational reasons for halting the services at Kushinagar,” said Rajendra Prasad, director, Kushinagar International Airport. He added that in October too, there had been 10 no-flight days, though there was still demand: each flight had a capacity of 78, with 60 passengers on average.
SpiceJet claimed that “passenger traffic has been consistently low” and that this was “a temporary stoppage of operations on this sector”. The company operates only one flight daily, between New Delhi and Kushinagar, and back. Between April and October 2022, there were 17,559 passengers who availed themselves of flights from Kushinagar. Data for this year is not yet available.
Kushinagar International Airport, only the third international airport in U.P., was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in October 2021 under the Central government’s regional connectivity scheme called UDAN (Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik). The aim of the scheme was to take flying to the masses and improve air connectivity to tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Of 74 airports built or revived since the launch of the scheme in 2018, 11 were greenfield airports (built from scratch) including Kushinagar. However, as reported by The Hindu on July 29, 2023, up to 15 airports have fallen into disuse, and nearly half of the 479 routes launched have collapsed.
Kushinagar residents feel one reason is the Gorakhpur Airport, 273 km east of Lucknow, just about 55 km from the town. At Gorakhpur, IndiGo, Alliance Air, and SpiceJet operate between the city and New Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata.
Kushinagar is a Buddhist pilgrimage site. “The Kushinagar international airport will provide better connectivity to Buddhist sites in both Uttar Pradesh and Bihar for domestic and foreign travellers because of its strategic location near Lord Buddha’s birthplace Lumbini, besides Kapilvastu, Sarnath where he gave his first sermon, and Bodh Gaya, where Buddha got enlightenment,” Mr. Modi had said, while inaugurating the airport.
A Sri Lankan delegation with more than 100 Buddhist clergy arrived on the first flight to Kushinagar in October 2021. Other than a few chartered flights, no other scheduled international flight has arrived or taken off from the airport.
