As dense cities encircle India’s busiest airports, dangers multiply

AHMEDABAD, India – Mr Bhavesh Patni had just sat down with his family for a lunch of eggplant and potato curry when an Air India plane took off from the runway behind their home, flew over their heads and crashed into a medical college campus visible from their building.

As Mr Patni climbed up to his terrace to watch the flames from

a disaster that would ultimately kill 241 people on the plane

and at least 34 on the ground in the city of Ahmedabad, he shuddered as he thought about his family’s proximity to the nightmare below them.

In Ahmedabad, as in cities across this country of 1.4 billion people, there is little buffer between the increasingly busy airport and the densely populated neighbourhoods that encircle it. That puts residents in the danger zone if anything goes wrong during take-offs and landings, the time when most aviation accidents occur.

This reality illustrates a pressing challenge for India.

The country’s growing wealth has given it the means to be more on the move. Air passenger traffic has doubled over the past decade, as has the number of operational airports. But India’s expanding aviation ambitions have been superimposed on existing urban infrastructures that are already pushed to the limit by the rapid growth of cities.

“It was only by God’s grace that we survived,” Mr Patni, a cargo handler at the Ahmedabad airport, said days after last week’s crash. As he spoke, rescue workers were still retrieving human remains from the wreckage, and cranes were trying to dislodge the aircraft’s tail from the medical college building’s roof.

Around the world, major airports are increasingly situated far from city centres, in part because such land is cheaper and expansion is easier, and in part to mitigate the health risks of noise and air pollution and the possible dangers of air accidents.

But the airports in India’s biggest cities are some of the most “enclosed” in the world, according to a 2022 study by researchers in Belgium. Mumbai’s airport topped the study’s rankings, and the airports in Kolkata, Ahmedabad and Delhi were among the top 25.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has particularly promoted the growth of air connectivity across the immense country. India, which has doubled the number of its international and domestic airports to more than 150 in the past decade, says it plans to increase the number to 350 in the next two decades.

With more than one million flights and 175 million passengers in 2024, India was the third-largest air transport market, after the US and China.

The country’s expanding economy has finally brought in the kind of resources that could lift up its long-neglected infrastructure. Mr Modi’s critics say he has pushed a model of development that prioritises quick results at the cost of careful planning and execution.

They point to roads and bridges that collapse soon after completion, and to the flouting of basic safety standards. India does not have enough airport officials who understand the minute details that are crucial to ensuring safety, said Mr Yeshwanth Shenoy, a public interest lawyer and activist who has been going to court for more than a decade to try to improve airport safety.

A parliamentary report earlier in 2025 said that there was serious staffing shortage in official bodies that enforce aviation safety standards, including a vacancy rate of more than 50 per cent in the civil aviation authority.

In Mumbai, where the international airport accounts for a quarter of India’s air traffic, there are more than 1,000 buildings that violate safety standards meant to prevent the obstruction of flight paths, Mr Shenoy said.

The city authorities admitted in court that hundreds of buildings were obstructions. But since the first demolition orders were given in 2016, only a handful have come down. And hundreds more have been built, Mr Shenoy said.

In the Ahmedabad crash, there has been no indication that buildings were in the way. The plane appeared to have failed to gain sufficient lift after take-off, and went into a steady descent before crashing less than a mile (less than 1.6km) from the runway. There has also not been any sign of a bird strike, a problem that the airport has struggled with for years.

But it has long been clear that there is little cushion around the airport, with packed clusters of modest homes, shops and hotels pressing up against its gates.

“If the airplane had crashed 500m earlier, thousands could have died,” said Mr Himmatsingh Patel, a former mayor of Ahmedabad, which is the largest city in the western state of Gujarat.

Ahmedabad was a very different place when its airport was built in the 1930s. It stood a safe distance of about 16km from the old city, Mr Patel, 64, said.

Mr Patel said he remembers joining his family as a child on picnics at the edge of the airport, to watch take-offs and landings.

Ahmedabad became an international airport in the 1990s. The city’s population had grown along with it and today, an estimated eight million live there, more than double the number 20 years ago.

One study found that a tenth of the population was affected by loud noise from air traffic. Many in the neighbourhoods around the airport said such noise was routine.

As the airport grew busier, these neighbourhoods – where amenities like grain markets and medicine shops sprang up – became highly sought after for jobs.

Mr Vikram Sinh, 60, who lives in a government-owned apartment there and runs a grocery store, was able to put two of his children through medical school with his earnings. Both are now doctors in Canada.

“This is a golden area in all of Gujarat,” he said. “I do not feel like leaving this place.” NYTIMES