It has now come to light that the Cochin Inter-national Airport Limited (CIAL) had not obtained clearance from the Kerala Pollution Control Board (KPCB) and the Nedumbassery panchayat before initiating work on the new sewage plant at the airport.
Answering a Right to Information query, the KPCB on January 28 said that the new treatment plant of the airport had not obtained its permission.
However, the KPCB said it had received an application from CIAL for creating a new waste water purification process on January 24.
The Nedumbassery panchayat, under whose jurisdiction the sewage treatment plant comes, also has said in reply to an RTI query on February 9 that it has not given a no-objection certificate (NOC) for the construction of the new sewage plant. The panchayat, surprisingly, added that for the existing plant also it had not given a licence to CIAL.
When contacted, CIAL official V. Sankar said that CIAL is not building a new sewage plant but was augmenting the capacity of the existing plant from 300 CMP to 750 CMP.
“Apart from capacity augmentation, we are going for modernisation of the plant and the documents for the same have been submitted to the KPCB in anticipation of approval,” he said. He added that he has to check the records to comment on the status with Nedum-bassery panchayat.
Residents of the panchayat have been complaining that when the pumping of sewage to the plant from the storage facility at the airport escalates, a stench spreads in the area.
The airport authorities say that they want to modernise the plant because of these complaints. “Once the modernised plant is in place, it will use the waste water from the plant for watering the CIAL golf course,” said Mr Sankar.
Int’l terminal to be 3-storey
The new state-of-the-art international terminal coming up at the Cochin International Airport Ltd (CIAL) will have 16 aero-bridges and an additional 30 parking bays besides the capacity to handle 4,000 passengers at any given point of time.
Expected to be commissioned by the last quarter of 2014, the new terminal wil also have 10 baggage carousels and increased immigration facilities.
“The building spread over 93,000 m-square will have three levels with the departure section located on the second, the arrival on the first and the immigration, customs and baggage screening on the ground floor,” airport director A.C.K. Nair told the Deccan Chronicle.
Passengers boarding flights would have to negotiate an elevated stretch to reach the departure terminal, he explained, adding that the design of the nearly Rs 400- crore new international terminal was nearly ready and would be placed before CIAL board next month for approval. Once it received the green signal, the tender for its construction would be floated in six months.
Meanwhile the present international terminal will be converted into a domestic terminal.