Adani Airports Holdings pitches for open-source passenger processing systems at airports

Adani Group's airport business chief Arun Bansal on Friday called for open source and interoperable passenger processing systems at airports, saying that at present, there is a monopoly of vendors offering the systems.

Adani Airport Holdings Ltd (AAHL) manages seven airports and is also developing the Navi Mumbai airport.

AAHL CEO Bansal said the passenger processing systems are not interoperable today.

"There is a monopoly of these vendors, and I really want Indian software developers to come up and create a passenger processing system that is open source, open in nature," he said, adding that it is working with regulators in this regard.

AAHL is also collaborating with Indian software companies to develop an indigenous software stack for passenger processing systems.

When asked whether the group is planning to develop an open-source system, Bansal replied in the negative.

"We are not planning to develop. There are a lot of Indian software companies that are best in class. We are collaborating with them to develop an indigenous software stack," he said.

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Speaking on the sidelines of the CAPA India Aviation Summit 2024, Bansal also said there is no policy change required with respect to having an open-source system.

"There is no policy change required. The existing software players have made it a close loop where you can't mix and match whereas the whole world is going to the open source," he noted.

Currently, AAHL manages seven airports at Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram.

India is one of the world's fastest-growing civil aviation markets, and both domestic and international traffic are on the rise.

India's domestic air traffic is expected to rise 6-8% to 161 to 164 million in the current financial year, while international air traffic is projected to jump 9-11% to 75 to 78 million in the current fiscal, aviation advisory firm CAPA India said on Wednesday.