Project PRIA: Pokhara’s Pride

With its inauguration by Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal on Sunday, the first day of the ‘English New Year’ 2023, the long-awaited Pokhara Regional International Airport (PRIA) has formally come into operation. And with that, an approximately five-decade old dream of the people of Pokhara has come true. The people of Pokhara had a hint of this dream coming true in April 2016 – on 1st Baisakh 2073 BS, the first day of the Nepali New Year six years ago – when the then Prime Minister KP Oli laid the foundation stone of Project PRIA. They were further reassured of realizing this dream by the way the Chinese company that was entrusted with the responsibility of building the airport met deadlines despite the Covid-19 pandemic and handed over Project PRIA to the Government of Nepal well before the deadline. Jubilant over the accomplishment of the dream that Pokhara saw for the first time in as early as 1971, hundreds and hundreds of people from the Pokhara Valley reached the airport on Sunday to witness the inaugural ceremony. The Pokhara Metropolitan City Office announced a public holiday to mark the occasion.

PRIA is the country’s third international airport which has formally come into operation just a little over eight months after the Gautam Buddha International Airport in Bhairahawa formally started international flights. Nepal has built its third international airport nearly seven and a half decades after the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA), the country’s first, came into operation. To build an international airport in Pokhara, land was acquired in 1976. More land was acquired later and the airport was finally built on a land area of nearly 3900 ropanis. The Chinese contractor of Project PRIA started building the project a year and a half after the foundation stone was laid, with the initial goal of completing the project by July 10, 2021. However, in the meantime, the country faced the unanticipated Covid-19 pandemic. Yet that did not stop the Chinese company which continued the work. On March 26, last year, the Chinese company handed over the project to Nepal, with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi handing over a symbolic key to the then Foreign Minister Narayan Khadka in the presence of the then Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba amid a special ceremony. Aircraft like narrow body Airbus 320 and Boeing 757-200 which can carry about 200 passengers at a time can take off and land at the newly-built PRIA. The Chinese company has delivered a modern and beautifully-designed airport which has been built at a total cost of about Rs 22 billion.

Maybe landlocked Nepal has been a bit slow in getting aerially connected to the rest of the world effectively but PRIA is an infrastructure that Pokhara can be proud of. It will certainly ease the situation of traffic congestion at the TIA in the capital Kathmandu. It will increase not only Pokhara’s but also Nepal’s connectivity. The people of Pokhara especially hope that PRIA will establish direct aerial links between Pokhara and different countries of the world, ending the need for them to rely on TIA for that. That means the new international airport will also open the doors for new opportunities in tourism for the lake city. The international airport will definitely help in bringing in more foreign tourists to Pokhara. Besides that, the airport can play a crucial role in directly exporting the agricultural produce - especially fruits, vegetables and cash crops like coffee - of the entire Gandaki Province to the international market. Therefore, now both the government and the private sector should focus on the marketization of PRIA. Though Nepal has air service agreements with 40 countries in the world, there are direct flights from Nepal to only 13 of them. Let’s hope PRIA helps in expanding the number of direct aerial destinations from Nepal.