Dangers multiply as dense cities encircle India's busiest airports

Country expanding aviation ambitions even as urban infrastructures are pushed to limit

- Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj

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.