INS Baaz Won’t Expand Its Wings, India Decides To Pivot Towards Galathea Bay Airport

India has shelved a five-year-old proposal to expand the INS Baaz naval air station at Campbell Bay, clearing the way for a greenfield international airport at Galathea Bay in the Nicobar Islands.

New Delhi: India has moved away from INS Baaz, the existing naval air station at Campbell Bay, and shifted to Galathea Bay on Great Nicobar Island, where it will build a greenfield airport, a choice the government says was driven by hard technical and strategic constraints rather than preference.

The Cabinet approved the Galathea Bay site last November, placing the facility under Indian Navy operational control.

The airport is the most visible of four interlinked projects that together constitute New Delhi's most ambitious transformation of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands since Indian independence. The others are an international container transshipment port (ICTP), a township and a power plant. The entire package, formally called the Great Nicobar Island (GNI) development plan, is designed to convert a remote and chronically under-resourced island at the southern tip of the archipelago into a dual-use strategic and commercial node.

Why Galathea Bay won out

A top source in the defence ministry said INS Baaz was evaluated alongside four other sites before being set aside. The base is hemmed in by a hill feature on its northern side that rises above 80 metres. Making it suitable for wide-bodied commercial aircraft would have required substantial hill-cutting, extensive dredging of a shallow coastline, and the demolition of existing Indian Navy infrastructure that already crowds the margins of the present short runway.

Safety clearances for a Category 4 runway, the international standard for large jets, could not be met without first removing those facilities.

The site also offered little room to grow. As per the source, any future runway extension, would have needed large-scale land reclamation and might have cut through inhabited areas, effectively splitting settlements in two.

By contrast, Galathea Bay sits approximately 30 km closer to the southern tip of the island and offers terrain that does not impose the same constraints. Disturbance to bird populations at INS Baaz was also assessed as significantly greater than at the greenfield location.

Great Nicobar Island sits roughly 40 km from the Six Degree Channel, the deep-water passage through which the sea route from the Gulf of Aden reaches the Strait of Malacca. About two-thirds of global oil shipments and half of the world's container traffic move through this corridor.

The ICTP, positioned some 40 nautical miles from the Malacca Strait, one of the most congested shipping chokepoints on the planet, is intended to capture a share of transshipment traffic that currently bypasses Indian ports in favour of Colombo, Singapore and Port Klang.

Beyond commerce, New Delhi regards a permanent and expanded military footprint on the island as a prerequisite for monitoring the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) at a time when regional and extra-regional powers have steadily deepened their naval and economic presence there.

The airport is expected to extend India's maritime domain awareness and allow sustained forward deployment of surveillance aircraft and naval assets.

The project is also framed within the MAHASAGAR doctrine, an acronym for Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions, articulated by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, which positions India as a preferred security partner and first responder for humanitarian and disaster-relief missions in the wider region.

Under the GNI Development Project, the government plans to invest around ₹13,000 crore to build a dual-use airport and runway for both civilian and Navy operations.

The project, as per the source, is expected to be completed within five years, will be jointly funded by the Ministry along with the Ministry of Civil Aviation.