BNP Government Moves to Launch Third Terminal Built During Sheikh Hasina’s Tenure

Staff Correspondent

The BNP government is working towards opening the third terminal of Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport on December 16. A large part of the construction work of the terminal was completed during the Awami League government. On October 7, 2023, the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina also partially inaugurated it. However, for various reasons, the terminal has not yet been fully operational.

Civil Aviation and Tourism Minister Afroza Khanam Rita announced plans to launch the terminal by December 16 this year. She said this at the inauguration of the ‘Aviation Journalism Training’ organized by the Press Institute Bangladesh on Tuesday.

The minister said that the work on the third terminal was left incomplete and in a bad condition by the previous government. The interim government also failed to make effective progress in this regard. The current government has taken the initiative to quickly launch the terminal after taking office.

However, the history of the project’s construction shows that the initiative to build the third terminal and its main construction work was done during the Awami League government. On December 28, 2019, the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the construction of the project. The project was implemented at a cost of about 21,300 crore taka with funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Bangladesh government.

The Aviation Dhaka Consortium, comprising Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation, Fujita Corporation, and South Korea’s Samsung C&T, is constructing the project. The terminal, built on an area of ​​about 542,000 square meters, has an area of ​​about 230,000 square meters.

The progress of the construction work also reached its final stage during the last term of the Awami League government. In November 2022, 51 percent of the project was completed. In June 2023, the progress stood at 77.5 percent. In October of that year, Sheikh Hasina partially inaugurated the terminal after about 90 percent of the work was completed.

During the partial inauguration, it was announced that the terminal would be fully operational by 2024 after completing the remaining work. However, due to some technical work including system integration, testing and calibration of various equipment, and subsequent operational and ground handling complications, it could not be launched on schedule.

In May 2024, the then Minister of Civil Aviation announced that about 97 percent of the terminal construction work had been completed. In August of the same year, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced that the progress of the work had reached 98 percent.

As a result, the current government’s plan to launch the terminal on December 16 is essentially an initiative to complete the remaining work of this terminal, which has been under construction for a long time and is almost complete, and to fully operationalize it. Once the terminal is launched, the passenger and aircraft handling capacity of Shahjalal Airport will increase significantly.

According to information from project stakeholders, the third terminal will be able to serve about 24 million passengers annually once it is operational. The capacity of the two existing terminals at Shahjalal Airport is currently much less than this. As a result, the commissioning of the new terminal is expected to significantly reduce the long-standing capacity crisis at the country’s main international airport.