Since the advent of privatisation and deregulation in the 1990’s, the Indian aviation
industry has been perceived as a lucrative market in the Asian region. Recognising the
sheer potential in improving the airport facilities, the Indian aviation industry
underwent a major overhaul through policy changes and liberalisation of air transport
services. Despite such various initiatives for upgrading airport infrastructure, the
Indian airports are still considered inadequate to handle the upsurge in air traffic and
suffer from cost inefficiencies. This paper is an investigation aimed at establishing the
key performance measures that airports in the Indian context should use to evaluate
performance. It measures and compares the performance levels of five newly
privatised international airports in India while addressing several critical areas of
activity such as operations, economics, customer service, environmental issues, and
safety and security. The research heavily relies on the use of benchmarking to make
the comparatives across this representative sample of airports and serves as a
framework for the development of Key Performance Indicators. For this purpose, the
paper identifies and confirms a list of performance measures relevant to the Indian
conditions that emerged from surveying airport professionals associated with best
practice in the global aviation industry. The research seeks to foster the expansion of
the Indian airport market by developing an efficient performance management
framework that could be used by Indian airport managers to validate the operational
performance of their airports by comparing them to other award winning global
terminals. The paper also begins to develop a database of performance measures and
generates a reference for airport infrastructure assessment in developing countries
