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Member of Parliament Manish Tewari has written to Union civil aviation minister Kinjarapu Rammohan Naidu to make Shaheed Bhagat Singh International Airport as a designated Point of Call (POC) to enable foreign airlines to fly to and from here. “The Chandigarh international airport situated in Mohali, which is now called the Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh International Airport, services the states of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. A large number of people travel internationally from these three states both for the purposes of work as well as for tourism.
Unfortunately, the airport has not been designated as a POC for international airlines and therefore is not on the ‘bilateral offer list’, which is a prerequisite for foreign airlines to fly in and out of the airport,” reads the communique. “Under these circumstances, I will be extremely grateful if the airport is added as a POC to the list of 18 airports in India in addition to Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, which are designated as POC and are therefore on the bilateral offer list of the foreign airlines, to be able to fly to these airports,” he wrote in the letter. In January, the central government had told the Punjab and Haryana high court that airlines were free to choose markets and destinations within the ambit of Bilateral Air Services Agreements (BASA) concluded between India and such a country to start an international flight from a city in India.
“Commercial operations of airlines are deregulated and the government does not regulate/ interfere the operational plans of the airlines. Accordingly, the airlines are free to select whatever markets and networks they wish to service and operate within the ambit of BASA (based on which seat capacity etc. is decided),” V Vualnam, secretary, ministry of civil aviation, Government of India, said in response to a high court notice in October 2024, asking the Centre why Shaheed Bhagat Singh International Airport had just two international flights.
“There is also no explanation coming from the Chandigarh International Airport Authority Limited as to why there are only two international flights from Chandigarh (UT and capital of two prosperous states) on daily basis...
It is unfortunate to note that even a district headquarter like Amritsar has more than 14 international flights to various countries,” the court had observed while seeking affidavit from the aviation secretary. A long wait: only 2 international destinations Inaugurated on September 15, 2015, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the new terminal has been built at an estimated cost of ₹ 1,400 crore. In the beginning, there were only 40 odd flights that have now gone up to 90, including two to international destinations.
Currently, the airport offers only two international flights to Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In one of the letters written in 2022 on the issue in response to the demand raised by the Punjab government in that year, the Centre had told the state government that India ha an open sky agreement with the United Kingdom, which permitted designated carriers to operate seven services per week to and from any non-metro airport and Chandigarh was also in the list of such airports. In the same letter, the Centre also said Chandigarh was not available as a POC for Canada and thus, Canadian carriers could not operate direct flights to and from Chandigarh, the affidavit from secretary, department of civil aviation, had said then.
Apart from the two international flights, the airport caters to 33 domestic routes across the country, including Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Goa, Hyderabad, Indore, Leh, Jaipur, Lucknow, Chennai, Patna, Pune, Srinagar, Jammu, Hisar and Dharamshala..
