More than 25 years since the idea of having a second international airport - as an alternative to the country’s only international airport at Kathmandu -  was mooted in Nepal, the country is nowhere near to building it.  The plan was to build a second international airport at Bara in Nijgadh, 135 km southwest of Kathmandu. Last year, the government shortlisted a Swiss firm to build the airport with a budget of $3.45 billion. But the pandemic rocked the civil aviation industry last year and the project never got off the ground.    

Amid the unprecedented slowdown in the sector, getting a foreign investor to build the airport looks impossible now. “If we wait for the project to be developed through foreign funding, it will never happen,” Rajan Pokhrel, the director-general of Civil Aviation Authority in Nepal, was quoted as saying by The Kathmandu Post.

“But if we start on our own, the project, which will likely take seven years to complete, will at least get moving,” he said. The government has already spent $17 million on the project.

The delay in the project is not only caused by funding or planning issues. It also faced resistance due to environmental concerns; many petitions are still pending in the Supreme Court challenging the construction on environmental grounds. The project is expected to see 2.4 million trees uprooted from the site.

Recently, the Civil Aviation Authority in Nepal hired a consultant to prepare a master plan for the project. But the government is yet to decide if they want to go ahead with the project with its own resources.

The Asian Development Bank has estimated that the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu will see 7.28 million passengers annually by 2028, and the airport can’t sustain it. So there is an urgent need for the Nepal government to swiftly move on its plan for the second international airport.

A delay in the decision now could prove costly a decade later. In that condition, Nepal might also fail to tap the tourism potential in the region, as it had earlier planned while selecting the project site.