Wednesday, October 31, 2007

ROBOTICS & RFID TECHNOLOGIES: Next Big Thing for Baggage Handling at Indian Airports- Sunrise Opportunity for SME players

With the recent developments in India’s Domestic Airline market and growth in the international and domestic passenger and freight (cargo) traffics, Industry players (Airline/Forwarders/Passengers), Ministry of Civil Aviation, Airport Authority of India and IATA have unanimously identified the need of lacking support infrastructure essential for stabilizing Industrial growth.

As the airline passenger traffic is projected to grow at 19% annually, Indian cargo market is expected to grow at 24% per annum for the next 5 years. Moreover, 91% of Industry players are bullish about the India’s growth story. Companies like Air India, Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines, Indigo, and GoAir have collectively ordered 300+ aircrafts since 2005 and have handled 106.97 thousand aircraft movements (excludes General Aviation movements), 9.37 million passengers and 142.42 thousand tonnes of freight since April 2007-August 2007 (Source-AAI Web).

All these developments have got the GOI (Government of India) mind rolling and to overcome the rising infrastructural bottlenecks, Ministry of Civil Aviation and AAI have decided to build 35 ‘Non-metro Greenfield airport projects’ to handle passenger and cargo traffic by 2010.

Besides Infrastructure projects, Ministry & AAI are bringing in World-class Supply Chain Mgt. and Logistics Handling practices to its Airport facilities for greater, improved and systematic baggage handling. IGIA (Indira Gandhi Int. Airport), plans to implement RAR (Regulated Agent Regime) and C-TPAT for obtaining Operational & Security competence in cargo handling.

Where RAR advocates Cargo receiving, handling and loading operations, C-TPAT deals with Cargo security through GSA, GHA, and Airline & Freight Forwarder participation. Complementary to the above case, AAI plans to introduce Robotics & RFID to ramp up baggage handling operations at 4 metro airports by 2009. AAI is in talks with leading IT software makers to provide Baggage Handling Mgt. systems & Ground Handling Agents (GHAs) for RFID Hardware.

This complete development involves a sunrise opportunity for SME hardware manufacturers as most of the RFID equipment is expected to be domestically procured.

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