CONTEXT: A consortium of Adani Group and the City & Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO) is developing a new international airport at Navi Mumbai. It is being built at Ulwe, next to the National Highway 348A and is about six km from Panvel.

Going by the masterplan, to be executed in phases by 2032, the airport will have three passenger terminals catering to 100 million passengers per annum (MPPA), a cargo terminal handling 2.5 million tonnes freight per annum, and two runways.

The first phase is being constructed by L&T. It encompasses a 20 MPPA terminal, a 3.7 km runway, an air traffic control (ATC) tower, a multi-level car park,
17 other ancillary buildings, and complete systems integration.

Two L&T verticals – Buildings & Factories and Transportation Infrastructure – began work on the project in May 2022. As of February 2025, the airside (runway, taxiway, apron, ATC, etc.) is almost ready, and the landside (terminal building, approach ramp, parking, etc.) has progressed nearly 60%.

A trial commercial flight of IndiGo landed and took off from the airport on 29 December 2024, and the airport management has plans to start regular domestic flights this June-July.

 

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A series of deafening explosions ripped through the air, and soon, thick clouds of blackish dust erupted across the skyline!

Standing some two km away on the veranda of his makeshift project office, Nitin Chauhan felt the ground beneath him tremble! Inside, a portion of the ceiling collapsed.

 
A newly inducted graduate engineer trainee at L&T, Nitin squinted through his protective glasses but couldn’t see a thing beyond the dense pall of dust hanging ominously over the horizon. A scene from the Kannada blockbuster KGF flashed in his mind.

 

“It was June 2022, barely a month since I joined L&T. The mining scene from KGF Chapter 2 was vivid in my memory and that’s what I could best relate it to. This is almost a mine: I told myself,” Nitin recalls, referring to the Navi Mumbai airport project site where he is now a design coordinator.

 

That was more so because, before the blast each day, there would be a procession of L&T workers and construction machinery moving out of the blast zone in hordes and relocating about a km away for safety.

 

“Constructing world-class airports is our forte, but this project is a bit different. A vast part of this 2,867-acre airport site was a large, rugged rocky hill, and the client had appointed another agency to mow it down through controlled blasts. The task was to be completed by December 2022, but it continued till March 2024,” says Suman Chanda, L&T’s Taskforce Leader at the project.

 

On the days designated for blasts, construction work would get stalled for almost three hours on an average.

“Losing such a long time on a working day was a huge deterrence. Since this was unavoidable, we made the agency schedule the blasts for 12.30 noon so that our workers could utilise the time for lunch, rest and personal chores,” Mr Chanda adds. “But our go-getter project team has overcome these challenges and the only thing on top of our mind now is the completion of the new airport in a record time and make history.”

 

To make up for the time loss, L&T mobilised as many as 40,000-odd workers for the project to maintain an average strength of 10,000-odd workmen at the site. This apart, it mobilised additional mobile cranes of 1250, 700, 650 and 600 MT capacity, and formwork materials weighing as much as 6,000 MT.

 
At the site now, it’s a beehive of activity: with thousands of workers busy transforming the once-rugged hill-site, step by step, into a greenfield international airport that the people of Mumbai metropolitan region are eagerly looking forward to.

 

 

If you catch an aerial view of Navi Mumbai airport’s passenger terminal, structurally it almost resembles an eagle perched on a vast ground with its wings open. But when looked at from the ground, the intricately designed façade makes it appear like the curved petals of a lotus.
 
The central part of the terminal, 305 metres long and 255 metres wide, houses the forecourt, passenger entry/exit gates, airline offices, check-in counters, waiting zones, retail facilities, lounges and security check. The two wings, 625 metres long in total and 22-35 metres wide, house the boarding / deboarding gates and related amenities.

 

With a built-up area of 1.77 lakh square metres, the terminal is spread across three floors and three mezzanines that are sandwiched in between. The basement is for back-end utilities, ground floor and Level 1 mezzanine are for arrivals, a mezzanine above it is for baggage handling, and Level 2 and its mezzanine are for departures.

 

Because of its various sustainable features, the Indian Green Building Council has pre-qualified the terminal as a green building.

 
When you get to the airport to catch a flight, you will straightaway drive onto a ramp to the departure level. Alight, and step into a swanky new terminal only to be amazed by the strikingly milky-white lotus petals rising from the pillars to the ceiling!

 

“The petals are made of customised glass fibre reinforced gypsum, and we imported them from Dubai,” says Project Director Rajesh Pachlot, who is from L&T’s Buildings & Factories vertical.

 

But glass fibre reinforced gypsum is not the only imported raw material used in the project. There are metal panels and ceiling materials that L&T got tailor-made in China. Some of these items were airlifted to Navi Mumbai.

 

“The bulk of the materials from China arrived by sea. However, in view of the Chinese New Year when their factories go on a fortnight-long vacation, we deployed a cargo aircraft this January for the shipment so that work is not hampered due to shipping delays,” Mr Pachlot says, underscoring the speed at which the project is being undertaken.

 

At 3.7 km, the runway at the airport was the first thing commissioned in 2024. It is equipped with Category-II Instrument Landing System (ILS), which means a flight can land and take off even when the visibility falls to 350 metres.

 

“We completed the ILS calibration for the runway in August 2024, and subsequently, an IndiGo commercial flight test landed here in December,” says Arvind Kumar Jha of L&T’s Transportation Infrastructure, who happens to be the Project Manager for airside jobs.

 

Interestingly, this is the fourth-longest runway in India (among civilian airports), after the runways at the international airports at Delhi (4.43 km), Hyderabad (4.26 km) and Bengaluru (4.2 km).

 

L&T has also constructed a 12.5 km taxiway, a 580,000 sq ft apron and as much as 30.5 km internal roads – and this is something phenomenal. Further, the team has completed the foundation work for the extension of Navi Mumbai Metro to the airport, which CIDCO plans to take up in the near future.

 

As for security, the airport will have a network of 2,741 CCTV cameras, of which 295 alone would be along the boundary walls to trigger real-time alerts in case anyone tries to intrude.

 

 

As of February, the runway, taxiway, apron, the boundary wall and the ATC tower have been put in place, barring some system integration work. The terminal building, approach ramp, parking, etc., have progressed 60%, and L&T’s project team is working overtime to complete them by April.

 

“The terminal has two parts – the eastern wing is for international flights and the western for domestic. The airport management wants to commence domestic flights from June-July and hence we are working on a war footing to commission the western wing and the central portion first,” says Mr Chanda. “By September, we will deliver the entire project to the airport management,” he adds.
 
The Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (Atal Setu), another masterpiece constructed by L&T and commissioned in 2024, brought Mumbai and Navi Mumbai many miles closer. Now, once the Navi Mumbai airport becomes operational, it will literally maximise the Maximum City.

 

The hitherto far-flung townships of Airoli, Ghansoli, Nerul, Seawoods, Belapur, Kharghar, Panvel, Uran, Ulwe, etc., will become the new, much-coveted destinations to work and live in. L&T can take pride that it played a pivotal role in this transformative flight.