India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation wants to build new airfreight stations across the country to streamline customs, reduce congestion and the turnaround time.

These goals have been set out in the ministry’s draft aviation policy that it has published. The policy also states that six metropolitan airports will be developed into regional cargo hubs with multimodal transport facilities, cold chain capabilities and “other commodity specific” infrastructure.

The policy does not name the airports and has no timetable or costing against the list of objectives. The draft policy itself is only four pages long. 

As public, private partnership joint ventures, the airports at India’s cities of Hyderabad, New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore are possible cargo hub candidates. The policy notes that aviation has been growing at double-digit levels for much of the last decade. 

India has 132 airports, 31 of which are not operational. The  Airports Authority of India runs 46 domestic and 15 international airports. Six airports are run by local government.