New Delhi, Nov. 22: A 10-year-old proposal for an airport in Navi Mumbai received environmental clearance today after months of intense negotiations and eventual compromises from both sides.

The Union environment ministry set 32 conditions, including compensatory mangrove plantation on 678 hectares around the new site to replace the 161 hectares of mangrove that will be cut down to build the airport.

Also, it got the civil aviation ministry to agree to reduce the distance between the two planned runways from 1,800 metres to 1,550 metres so that the Gadhi river need not be diverted.

“We have negotiated, bargained, compromised,” environment minister Jairam Ramesh said. “But we will have an environmentally safe, an ecologically sound and an energy-efficient airport in Navi Mumbai.”

Maharashtra had sent the proposal for the airport to the civil aviation ministry in October 2000, saying it was needed to ease the air traffic gridlock over Mumbai. The proposal raised concerns because the original design would have caused the loss of mangroves, the diversion of a river and a tide-driven water body, and the removal of a 90-metre-high hill located along the flight path towards the runways.

Ramesh said the hill would have to be levelled but added that it had virtually no ecological value because it had been quarried.

He said both the environment and civil aviation ministries had had to make compromises. “Our compromise has been to accept the Navi Mumbai site as a fait accompli.”

Nearly 80 per cent of land acquisition is complete. “Instead of going back to the drawing board and adding two or three years for assessment and (the) land acquisition process, I decided to accept the fait accompli in good faith,” Ramesh said. The first phase of the new airport, which will have a capacity to handle up to 10 million passengers a year, is expected to be complete by the end of 2014 at a cost of Rs 4,424 crore.

During the first phase, the project is expected to generate 25,000 jobs. Eventually, the number of direct and indirect jobs resulting from the airport is expected to touch 1 lakh.

“This will be significant for the economy of Maharashtra and of India,” civil aviation minister Praful Patel said. “We’ve been concerned at the lack of capacity of the Mumbai airport.”

The air traffic over Mumbai is so gridlocked that during peak times, incoming aircraft have to hover around the city for more than 30 minutes. Patel said the new alignment of the runways falls within international guidelines for safe operation of two runways.

Ramesh’s ministry has also demanded that about 3,000 families from seven villages falling within the airport zone should be rehabilitated under state or central policies, “whichever is more beneficial to the project-affected persons”.

The City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra, which plans to develop the airport, will have to obtain clearance under the Forest Conservation Act.

Airfares

Officials of the directorate-general of civil aviation (DGCA) and the civil aviation ministry will soon meet to discuss how to stop domestic airlines from sharply hiking fares whenever demand rises. Some airlines increased fares by 25 per cent after Diwali.

“The DGCA has been serious about it. We also expressed our concern and intervened... regarding sudden fare escalation,” Praful Patel said.

A few days ago, the DGCA had asked domestic airlines to furnish route-wise fares on their entire network on the first of each month, and report any “significant and noticeable change” in fares “within 24 hours”. It asked the carriers to publish airfares on their websites or in daily newspapers.