India, April 9 -- In 2019, in the first wave of privatisation undertaken by the BJP-led NDA government, the Adani Group won the mandate to build, operate and manage six airports across India, including Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Thiruvananthapuram, Guwahati and Mangalore.

Two years after this, the board of the Airport Authority of India (AAI) prepared a list of another 13 airports for privatisation. In this second cohort, the government clubbed seven smaller airports with six big airports for the process - Varanasi was clubbed with Kushinagar and Gaya, Amritsar with Kangra, Bhubaneswar with Tirupati, Raipur with Aurangabad, Indore with Jabalpur, and Tiruchirappalli with Hubli as many of the smaller airports were unlikely to attract bidd...