The Gap Between Groundbreaking and Ground Reality

Six regional airports in Uttar Pradesh, inaugurated with fanfare between 2021 and 2024, have gone quiet. In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for Civil Aviation Murlidhar Mohol confirmed that Kushinagar, Aligarh, Azamgarh, Chitrakoot, Shravasti, and Moradabad are among 15 airports nationally now temporarily non-operational under the UDAN regional connectivity scheme — a list that also includes Pathankot, Pakyong, Bhavnagar, Ambikapur, Rourkela, Ludhiana, Datia, Kalaburagi, and Shimla.

The official reasons cluster around a familiar set of constraints: the expiry of the three-year Viability Gap Funding window that subsidised routes, low passenger load factors, missing VFR night-landing infrastructure, regional carrier fleet shortages, and absent on-site refuelling. Kushinagar International — the costliest of the six at an estimated ₹260–435 crore — lasted roughly two years before pausing. The smaller airstrip upgrades at Azamgarh, Aligarh, Shravasti, and Moradabad, each around ₹29–30 crore, went dark within three to nine months of opening.

Bihar's AIIMS Darbhanga tells a slower version of the same story. Sanctioned by the Union Cabinet in September 2020 at ₹1,264 crore under PMSSY, the project's cost has since drifted upward — reported at ₹1,964 crore following a March 2026 Cabinet approval of an additional ₹700 crore, and separately at ₹2,006 crore in RTI filings and media accounts. The Bihar government committed a further ₹309.29 crore in 2023 just for soil filling and land levelling across roughly 187–189 acres, work that had to precede any main construction.

That earthwork became the visual proxy for delay: the completed boundary gate, standing alone against empty land, spawned a viral claim that it alone had cost ₹1,200 crore. An RTI response from executing agency HSCC Ltd. found no standalone sanction or separate tender for the gate — the claim conflated the project's overall budget with the one visible structure on site. As of mid-2026, total expenditure stood at ₹19.39 crore, under 1% of the sanctioned budget, with the target completion date now pushed to July 2029 — nine years after Cabinet approval.

Neither story is about fraud. Both are about the widening interval between a ribbon-cutting and a functioning asset — and about how that interval gets filled, in the interim, by symbolism.

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