Decade after GMR’s ouster, AAI to study Maldives plea to run airport

The Centre has asked Airports Authority of India (AAI) to study a request from Maldives seeking assistance of Indian companies to manage its recently upgraded Hanimaadhoo International Airport. The request comes more than a decade after the Maldives government abruptly terminated a contract with Indian infrastructure conglomerate GMR to develop the Male International Airport and evicted the company’s staff from the island.

Earlier this week, the Ministry of Civil Aviation wrote to AAI saying that the request for assistance was made during the inauguration of the airport on November 9, 2025, by President Mohamed Muizzu to Civil Aviation Minister K. Ram Mohan Naidu, who was present as a special envoy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

AAI has been instructed to study the proposal for “engaging Indian companies for the management of the airport”, a senior official from the Ministry told The Hindu. 

AAI manages 26 State government airports, in addition to owning 113 airports in the country. Thirteen AAI-owned airports are managed by private operators such as GMR, GVK and Adani Group, which has seven AAI airports under its kitty, apart from Navi Mumbai.

India supported the redevelopment and expansion works at Hanimaadhoo airport that has been operational since 1986 with a $800 million line of credit issued by EXIM Bank of India. Redevelopment works were contracted to an Indian company, JMC Projects, at a cost of $136.6 million. The upgradation includes a 2,465-metre runway capable of landing an Airbus A320 aircraft and a new passenger building to handle 1.3 million flyers annually. The airport is dubbed as a catalyst for economic growth in the northern region of Maldives as well as enhanced global connectivity. 

Maldives’s request has come over a decade after a debacle that saw GMR’s ouster from the island. In November 2012, the Maldives Cabinet cancelled a deal signed with GMR in 2010 for upgrading and operating the country’s biggest airport. The $511 million deal was Maldives’s biggest foreign investment project at the time and was declared void-ab-initio (having no legal effect from inception) with GMR given a seven-day ultimatum to leave the country.

In 2014, the Chinese company Beijing Urban Construction Group was awarded the contract for construction works and the Maldives government said the airport would not be privatised again after its operations were handed over to the government-owned Maldives Airports Company Limited.

Later, on October 25, 2016, GMR was awarded a compensation worth $270 million for wrongful termination of the deal by a tribunal at the Singapore Arbitration Centre.