India’s airports have changed more in the last decade than in the four before it.
The shift is visible to every passenger, but the more significant change is in how airports are run behind the scenes. In this conversation, Sunil Parate, Senior Vice President, Aviation, OCS Group India, draws on 37 years in the sector to share what has really changed, what still holds it back, and what the next wave of privatisation will demand from facilities management partners.
From transport infrastructure to a customer-centric business
A decade ago, an Indian airport was largely a piece of transport infrastructure. Today it is a commercial, customer-centric business run with private sector efficiency.
“The airport has evolved from being transport infrastructure to a commercial and customer-centric business run with private sector efficiency. Earlier the focus was on connectivity. Today the focus is passenger experience.” – Sunil Parate, Senior Vice President, Aviation, OCS Group India
The change is most visible in the passenger journey. Where travellers once moved through multiple manual checks, boarding pass printing, and baggage tagging queues, technology and policy have made travel almost seamless. DigiYatra, self check-in and Self Baggage Drop have collectively compressed the pre-security journey into minutes, and most Indian airports have already rolled these systems out.
How privatisation reshaped procurement
Privatisation did not only change ownership. It changed the way airports buy facilities management.
The journey has moved through three distinct stages:
- Manpower deployment model; vendors were paid for the number of people supplied.
- AMC and CMC model; the scope expanded to include operation, maintenance and comprehensive contracts.
- Outcome-based contracting; today’s model, where the customer specifies the result, not the resource.
“In the outcome-based contract, the customer does not talk about the manpower. It is for the FM partner to decide how to manage the assets and how many people to deploy. The SLA and the KPI are what is measured, not the headcount.” – Sunil Parate
This shift has changed the economics of airport FM. Instead of duplicating manpower across nearby locations, operators are optimising deployment against defined service levels, which also opens the door to smarter engineering and technology adoption.
Engineering complexity that passengers never see
Airports are not comparable to malls, hotels or commercial buildings. The systems that carry the passenger experience, from the Baggage Handling System, aerobridges, cooling, power backup, to the CUTE and CUSS platforms, are engineering ecosystems in their own right.
The move to aerobridges alone has reduced dependence on ramp buses and ground equipment, cutting emissions inside the aircraft movement area. Digital additions such as DigiYatra and Self Baggage Drop have improved throughput and added measurable time and behaviour data to the operation. When 15 airports run under a single integrated operating model, that data becomes central to performance. Fragmented multi-vendor delivery makes that centralised control almost impossible.
Where operators still get it wrong
Even after the move to outcome-based contracts, cost remains the deciding factor at the point of award. The lowest bidder route continues to dominate.
“There is still a concern. In my opinion the award should be based on a justified cost. If a vendor is quoting below the justified cost, they will either fail to perform or they will put the assets in distress.” – Sunil Parate
The second gap is mindset.
The technology available at Indian airports is already at par with the best in the world. What lags is the willingness to trust it. SCADA systems, for example, allow four powerhouses to be monitored from a single control room by a small team, yet many customers still ask for manual readings alongside, which routes trained manpower into non-productive tasks.
The people question
The third round of privatisation covers 11 more airports, and Navi Mumbai Phase 2 is moving forward. The scale of expansion will test the market on one specific point; the availability of qualified, experienced people.
Qualified engineers and technicians in India often move overseas for better prospects, widening the skills gap on the ground at exactly the moment when demand is growing.
“Providing skilled manpower will be the showstopper for growth. We need more training centres and ITIs training people on the assets that airports actually run.” – Sunil Parate
The answer is rebalancing people and technology rather than choosing one over the other.
From contractor to business partner
Perhaps the most important shift is cultural. Private operators are no longer treating FM providers as vendors. They are treating them as business partners, because the operator’s business runs on the assets the FM partner maintains.
“If the FM partner fails, the operator fails. That is why the relationship has shifted from contractor to business partner.” – Sunil Parate
The road ahead
Robotic cleaning is already standard at almost every Indian airport. The next avenues like glass façade robotics, airside marking done to ICAO and DGCA specification, and predictive engineering are open but under-used. Marking, in particular, is still perceived by many customers as painting, when in reality, it is a regulated technical discipline.
The next five to ten years will be defined by expansion. The FM partners who succeed will be those who bring engineering depth, technology fluency, trained people, and a partnership mindset to every airport they operate.
