Civil aviation ministry contemplates restricting ground handling activities in six metro airports to a few players, including Airports Authority of India or the joint venture companies, working on modernising these airports.
Those who would be allowed to undertake these activities at these major metro airports also include either Air-India and Indian or an independent agency to be selected through competitive bidding, official sources said.
For the remaining airports across the country, the present arrangement of allowing respective airlines to do ground handling job would continue, the sources said.
The metro airports, where the ministry is thinking of restricting the number of ground handling agencies, are Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The airports at Mumbai and Delhi are now being run by consortia led by GMR and GVK groups.
Sources said such a move to limit the number of agencies for ground handling would standardise these operations, which include passenger handling at the landside and loading and unloading of aircraft and aircraft handling.
The idea of restricting the number of ground handling agencies was floated earlier too, but the move could not fructify as especially the private airlines objected to it.
The private carriers had then opined that ground handling by competing carriers could adversely affect their flight operations on several counts, including delays in passenger or cargo clearance.