Plastic Chairs and Unplugged Scanners: Inside India’s ‘Potemkin’ Airports

There is a specific kind of silence found only in a failed airport. It is different from the silence of a library or a church. It is the silence of irrelevance.

Visit the terminal at Ludhiana’s Sahnewal Airport on a Tuesday afternoon. This is the “Manchester of India,” a bustling industrial hub with a GDP that rivals some small nations. By all logic, it should be swarming with business travellers. Instead, the terminal is a ghost town.

As per the DGCA’s Winter Schedule 2025, flight operations here are officially suspended. The baggage scanner sits in the corner, unplugged and gathering dust a relic of a future that never arrived. Rows of plastic chairs are stacked against the wall, pristine and unused. The lone airline that serviced this route, FlyBig, has pulled out, leaving the city “grounded”.

This is the “Ghost Airport” phenomenon. In the last decade, we have doubled the number of airports in India. It sounds like a triumph of infrastructure. But look closer, and you see what critics call “Potemkin villages”: shiny facades with absolutely nothing behind them.

The ‘trophy’ project problem: the case of Pakyong

If Ludhiana is a commercial failure, Pakyong Airport in Sikkim is a monument to engineering hubris. Inaugurated by the Prime Minister as India’s 100th airport, it was pitched as a marvel carved into the Himalayan mountainside at a cost of over Rs 550 crore.

It looks breathtaking on a postcard. But in reality? It is an operational nightmare. Flight operations at the airport have been suspended since June 2024. Why? Because the planners forgot that the Himalayas have weather. The airport lacks a sophisticated Instrument Landing System (ILS) capable of handling the region’s notorious cloud cover.

As a result, flights were cancelled more often than they landed. We built a runway where the clouds refuse to part, prioritizing the headline of “connecting Sikkim” over the aeronautical reality of flying there. Today, the only things flying at Pakyong are the birds.

The subsidy mirage

The failure isn’t just about brick and mortar. It is about the financial quicksand known as Viability Gap Funding (VGF).

The government promised to subsidise 50% of the seats on these flights to make them affordable. It sounded perfect on paper. But speak to any regional airline CEO off the record, and they will tell you the grim reality: the payment cycles.

Small operators cannot survive on government IOUs. When the VGF payments get delayed, which they often do, the cash flow chokes. These airlines don’t have the war chest of an IndiGo to weather a bad quarter.

Furthermore, the “One Size Fits All” model of airport design is fiscally reckless. Why does a small town like Chitrakoot need a terminal with the same security specifications, granite flooring, and X-ray machinery as a metro hub? We have over-engineered these airports for a traffic volume that doesn’t exist. Low-cost airports (essentially paved airstrips with a prefab shed) work wonders in Africa and Australia. But in India, the “Edifice Complex” demands that every terminal looks like a mini-palace, driving up operating costs so high that the airport becomes a permanent liability from Day One.

The political trap

Why do we build them? The answer lies in the pathology of Indian politics: Construction is the only metric of success that is visible. An MP cannot cut a ribbon on a “sustainable route subsidy policy.” But they can cut a ribbon on a terminal building.

Politicians want the photo-op. They want the plaque with their name on it. They don’t care if the airport is commercially viable; they only care that it is inaugurated before the Model Code of Conduct kicks in.

The fallout is a massive drain on the exchequer. The taxpayer is bleeding over Rs 90 crore annually just to maintain these zombie airports. The scanner needs electricity even if no bags go through it; the security staff needs salaries even if no passengers show up; the runway needs weeding even if no tires touch it.

The cost of ego

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge didn’t mince words recently, citing a CAG report to claim the UDAN scheme was a “jumla”. He alleged that the scheme did not work on 93% of the routes.

Whether you view that as political mudslinging or not, the confirmed suspension of flights at Ludhiana, Pakyong, Aligarh, Moradabad, Chitrakoot, Bhavnagar, and Shravasti this winter proves the point. That is seven airports, built with crores of public money, generating zero value.

We built the stage, turned on the spotlight, and forgot to check if there was an audience.

It is time to stop the concrete pouring. We have an “Edifice Complex,” an obsession with building structures rather than systems. Until we prioritise economics over optics, these terminals will remain what they are right now: very expensive, very air-conditioned waiting rooms for passengers who aren’t coming.

Harsh Verma is an independent policy commentator based in Delhi-NCR.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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