Odisha doesn't need three small airports. It needs one big one.
Hub-and-spoke aviation works because one large, well-connected anchor airport is more efficient than several small, half-used ones. It concentrates international and wide-body traffic in a single location with the runway length, apron space, and ground infrastructure to handle it — then feeds passengers outward by road, rail, or short domestic hops to the rest of the state.
Puri and Paradeep are each getting their own airports right now, in parallel, with limited land and modest passenger projections. Meanwhile Charbatia — 2,000 acres of already-fenced, already-government-owned land, 10 km from Cuttack and roughly 25 km from Bhubaneswar — sits almost entirely unused by an intelligence unit that runs a handful of flights a year.
2,000 acres today. Room for 3,000.
The Aviation Research Centre's Charbatia base has stood on roughly 2,000 acres since the 1960s, built with CIA assistance for high-altitude reconnaissance work during the China years. In 2011 the Indian Air Force itself wanted to convert it into a full IAF station — before those plans were shifted to Panagarh, West Bengal, for reasons that had nothing to do with the land's suitability.
That land footprint is bigger than Bhubaneswar's existing airport and larger than most of the greenfield sites being planned elsewhere in the state. With the surrounding agricultural land largely low-density and government-adjacent, expansion toward 3,000 acres is a realistic planning target — enough for a full four-runway, dual-terminal international hub.
Room for two parallel runways and a diagonal third.
A land parcel this size, this regularly shaped, and this free of encroachment is rare in eastern India. It comfortably supports a dual-parallel-runway configuration — the standard layout for any hub expecting simultaneous wide-body movements — plus a diagonal cross-runway to keep operations flexible when wind direction rules one pair out.
Cuttack sits where the people already are.
An airport only works if enough people can reach it easily. Cuttack sits at the centre of Odisha's single largest urban cluster — Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, and the industrial belt around them — with a combined population well past two million within a short drive. Puri city itself is home to roughly 200,000 people; Paradeep's municipal population is under 70,000. Neither comes close to the catchment that Cuttack anchors by default.
ARC / Cuttack
Puri
Paradeep
Population figures: Census 2011 municipal data. Distances: road/air estimates, rounded.
Puri and Paradeep will not generate enough standalone demand.
Puri's case rests almost entirely on pilgrimage and beach tourism — real, but seasonal and seasonal demand doesn't fill a wide-body schedule year-round. Paradeep's case rests on port and industrial cargo — genuinely important, but a cargo-and-charter airport doesn't need the same passenger infrastructure as a full international hub, and its small resident population can't sustain meaningful scheduled passenger traffic on its own.
Both places deserve better connectivity. Neither needs to be — or realistically can be — Odisha's second international gateway. A regional airstrip or a cargo-focused facility fits Paradeep. A short, fast road link to a larger nearby hub fits Puri better than a full airport competing with Bhubaneswar for the same narrow catchment forty minutes away.
Why runway length isn't a footnote.
Every aircraft class needs a different minimum runway length, and it scales fast. A regional turboprop like the ATR-72 needs around 1,500m. A narrow-body workhorse like the Airbus A320 needs closer to 1,900m. Once you're talking about genuine long-haul, wide-body capability — Boeing 777s, Airbus A380s — you're looking at 2,700-3,000m, plus the wider taxiways, stronger pavement, and bigger apron parking bays that come with aircraft in that weight class.
A 2-lane road can carry a bus. It can't carry a freight convoy. The same logic applies here: a compact airstrip can host ATRs and A320s comfortably. Only a large, purpose-built parcel like ARC can credibly host wide-bodies — the aircraft that actually make an "international" airport international.
Other places already ran this experiment.
Concentrating capacity in one large hub instead of spreading it across several small sites isn't a theory — it's a pattern repeated across the world, often using exactly the kind of large, government-held land parcel that Charbatia represents.
A former U.S. Air Force base was converted into Clark International Airport, deliberately chosen over cramped in-city alternatives for its size and long-term expansion room — now Manila's designated second hub.
The city abandoned its smaller in-town airport for a new site built on a huge land parcel specifically to guarantee decades of expansion capacity — a bet on future scale over present convenience.
Germany closed two of Berlin's three airports and consolidated operations into a single larger hub (BER), betting that one well-resourced anchor beats three under-invested ones.
Turkey built one of the world's largest new-generation airports from scratch, explicitly designed for hub-and-spoke growth rather than adding several mid-sized regional fields.
Biju Patnaik built this land for exactly this purpose.
This isn't a new idea being forced onto old defence land. Biju Patnaik — Odisha's most consequential chief minister, a wartime RAF pilot, and the founder of India's first private airline, Kalinga Airlines — personally set up the Aviation Research Centre at Charbatia in 1963. He was, by any measure, the single person most responsible for Odisha's aviation ambitions taking physical shape in the first place.
The same man who flew his own Dakota into Indonesian airspace to rescue that country's revolutionary leaders, and who forced the Centre's hand to get Paradeep Port built when Delhi was stalling, chose Charbatia — not Puri, not Paradeep — as the site worth investing in for aviation. Sixty years on, that land is still there, still under-used, waiting for a decision his successors haven't made.
"Generations to come will be inspired by the bravery and selfless service of Biju Babu."
This isn't an argument against Puri or Paradeep.
Puri deserves better road and rail connectivity to a real international hub — not necessarily its own competing airport forty minutes from one that already exists. Paradeep deserves a cargo-and-charter facility sized to what its port and industry actually need. Neither needs to carry the weight of being Odisha's second international gateway when a far larger, far better-positioned parcel of land is already sitting there, mostly idle, ten kilometres from Cuttack.
The choice in front of Odisha isn't "one airport instead of three." It's "one properly-sized anchor, feeding two right-sized regional facilities" — instead of three under-scaled airports competing for the same limited demand.
One anchor. Two right-sized spokes. A state that finally thinks like a hub.
Odisha has the land. It has the history. It has the population math. What it hasn't had, in sixty years, is the political will to build on what Biju Patnaik already gave it.