Khajuraho Airport in Madhya Pradesh secured the joint top position in the Airports Authority of India’s customer satisfaction survey for January-June 2026, with a score of 4.98 out of 5. Incidentally, scheduled commercial flights from the airport stopped on July 1, before the survey results were out.
“A railway line, highway or waterway may each be justified within its sector’s plans, but the connections between them can be overlooked. “First- and last-mile links are a particular weakness. For example, a freight terminal or railway station may be built without adequate road connectivity to bring goods or passengers to it. Without powers to halt funding for individual projects, ITLA’s influence remains uncertain. “Different transport modes should complement rather than compete with one another, with choices guided by geography, the type of goods being moved, journey requirements, cost and efficiency. The need for coordination has been recognised for years. Gadepalli hopes the ITLA can be a via-media solution where ministries retain their powers but coordinate on project specific matters. “The ILTA may go-beyond co-ordination and execute projects which are not within any individual ministry’s mandate such as building a multimodal hub connecting a railway station with a bus station, where separate agencies may have to build different components and secure permissions from one another. The study compared the employment and mobility benefits of different investments.
The Union Cabinet’s October 6 approval of the Integrated Transport and Logistics Authority (ITLA) has raised expectations among policy observers that India could move towards more coordinated planning of roads, railways, ports, aviation, waterways and urban mobility. He said at different meetings within the government, the example of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism has been cited, which was created following a merger in 2001. To make the case for changing this approach, Gadepalli pointed to a 2020 policy brief by the International Association of Public Transport (UITP), which he co-authored. For every ₹ 10,000 crore invested in 2016-17, improving public bus services was estimated to generate 110.4 million man-days of employment and provide access to 10.6 billion passenger-trips, against 3.2 million man-days and 2.8 billion passenger-trips for road infrastructure development.
A senior government official with experience across more than one transport-sector ministry at the Centre, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said departments often plan to expand their own networks without adequately accounting for investments being made by others. Everybody is trying to increase their own share from the same pie without looking at which is the most beneficial for the end user or the most resource-smart,” the official said. The result, the official said, can be overlapping projects and infrastructure that does not connect properly with the wider network. Jagan Shah, professor of practice at IIT Delhi’s Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre, said the authority would need veto powers to make its broad mandate effective. Pawan Mulukutla, executive programme director for integrated transport, clean air and hydrogen at WRI India, said the authority should include industry representatives and independent experts to ensure decisions reflect operational realities. He said all investment decisions must be tested against the economics of moving people and goods, with scope to use modelling and artificial intelligence-based tools to assess which transport modes would work best for particular routes and types of freight. Ravi Gadepalli, founder of Transit Intelligence, a public transport consultancy, said the idea of an integrated transport ministry has been around for a long time, “But it is difficult for institutions (different ministries) to give up independent decision-making powers. He said slowly the approach is changing with rollout of schemes such as PM-eBus Sewa but a larger and more systematic transition from road building to bus service improvement is needed at the national and state-levels.
