New Delhi, May 17: The plan panel has cited the flier’s pocket in times of rising prices to sit on the civil aviation ministry’s plan to modernise Calcutta airport.

“Our intention was to protect users from excessive increase in user charges,” Gajendra Haldia, adviser to Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, said.

The plan panel has also asked the ministry to consider turning the existing international terminal at Calcutta, which is to be demolished under the ministry’s plans, into a separate terminal for low-cost airlines where user charges for both passengers and carriers would be low.

The panel estimates that user charges at the new terminal in Calcutta could rise to Rs 800 per passenger per flight if the airport is developed the way the ministry wants it, sources said. Haldia, however, refused to confirm this.

In Hyderabad and Bangalore, where new airports have been built, the operators’ plans to hike user charges from Rs 250 to Rs 700-800 have sparked anger. The issue has been raised in the Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka Assemblies and in Parliament.

The commission’s latest explanation, however, comes amid a running battle between Ahluwalia and civil aviation minister Praful Patel, who this week blamed the panel’s “constant objections” for the delay in the Calcutta project. In a letter to Ahluwalia, Patel had implied that the plan panel was against his ministry’s large-scale modernisation plans.

A few days earlier, Ahluwalia had rapped the ministry for congestion at Delhi airport.

The panel yesterday sent a point-by-point critique of the Rs 1,993-crore Calcutta airport modernisation project. It asked for the cost to be reworked completely and argued that the ministry’s own calculations of passenger traffic growth did not justify the way the new airport was being planned.

The ministry had told the Public Investment Board (PIB) that it expected domestic passenger traffic at Calcutta to grow by 12.4 per cent and international traffic by 6.4 per cent.

“However, in their plan they have taken a new figure of 20 per cent and 12 per cent for domestic and international traffic, without explaining. Why do they want a huge building with vast empty spaces?” a plan panel official asked.

A clearance from the PIB, which has the secretary (expenditure), secretary (civil aviation) and plan panel advisers as members, is crucial before any government department gets the cabinet’s final nod to spend money.

The commission has also asked the ministry not to outsource work at Calcutta airport to individual contractors and instead give all the work that is to be outsourced to a single private company, thus ensuring quality service.