Commercial flights to Kota, which is home to the coaching industry worth Rs 6000 crore, are yet to be a reality even nearly three decades after they were suspended in 1995.
A record two lakh students are enrolled in various coaching institutes this year. Once an industrial hub, the city has transformed into the coaching capital of the country in recent years. However, air connectivity till Kota remains a distant dream.
Commercial flights from Kota Airport were discontinued in 1995 after the passenger flow dried up following the industrial recession there. Coaching classes were yet to take shape of an industry in the 1990s.
According to a representative of a noted coaching institute here, lack of air connectivity is a big setback.
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"The students here are in a very competitive atmosphere, the exam is tough and the expectations are high. Due to lack of air connectivity many parents are not able to visit their children regularly. Similarly, even if there is a break, students often decide to stay back because of the travel time and do not visit home. This cut off kind of devoids children of the kind of moral support they can get from the families," said Nitesh Sharma, a spokesperson of Allen.
His thoughts were echoed by medical aspirant Sanchit Garg, whose parents run their own hospital in Bhopal.
"The nearest airport is Jaipur which is also a four-and-a-half hour drive from here. So even if they want to take a weekend off they cannot visit me because they will just get an hour or so with me after that much effort. Many of my friends are also on the same boat whose families do not have the time bandwidth to travel by train or other means of transport," he said.
In a failed attempt, recommencement of domestic air flight from Kota to Jaipur was kicked off by the then CM Vasundhra Raje in 2017. However, the continuity could not be sustained for more than seven months.
The Airports Authority of India (AAI) in April 2018 directed the Airport Authority of Kota (AAK) to stop the operation citing unavailability of mandatory clearance with the private airlines company from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation and AAI.
The Rajasthan Cabinet had last year cleared land allocation for a new greenfield airport in Kota. The state government has also allotted 1,250 acres for the proposed greenfield airport. However, the long awaited dream of Kota locals is far from being a reality.
Locals say the flights have not resumed here despite the kind of footfall the city receives.
"How can this be assumed that the flight operations here are not sustainable? A city that receives two lakh students from across the country. The coaching hub drives the economy of Kota and yet there is no air connectivity. Even Jodhpur, Udaipur have airports but not Kota. The coaching boom in Kota began in early 2000 and even two decades later, we do not have commercial flights landing here," said Vijay Singh Paliwal of Kota Airport Sangharsh Samiti.
Congress MP Rahul Gandhi had in 2018 written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to facilitate commercial air connectivity for Kota, citing that 1.5 lakh students across India study in coaching centres there each year and are inconvenienced due to the absence of such a facility.