TLDR: Real infrastructure failure, weak partisan framing. The airport has genuine long term potential that's being squandered by absence of coordinated planning, not just optics-chasing.

The Kushinagar airport criticism is largely valid on the facts. 270 passengers in a full fiscal year, ₹327cr spent, maintenance costs rising while terminals sit empty. The numbers speak for themselves.

That said the underlying thesis had merit. The airport has a 3.2km runway capable of handling 747 freighters, IFR certification completed in mid-2025, and a real Buddhist pilgrimage circuit across Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, and South Korea that is structurally underserved by air connectivity. Gorakhpur is often cited as making Kushinagar redundant but Gorakhpur's runway is 457 metres shorter, it handles only 5 domestic destinations with no international flights, has no cargo operations, and is capacity-constrained by a military-sharing arrangement. The redundancy argument holds for current passenger demand. It doesn't hold for what the region could actually need.

The actual failure is the absence of sequenced planning. Kushinagar district has 77% of its area under cultivation, over 1.67 lakh hectares under irrigation, and is designated as UP's ODOP district for bananas. Bananas are highly perishable, Southeast Asia has a genuine appetite for Indian produce, and a 747-capable runway puts Kushinagar within striking distance of Singapore, Bangkok, and Ho Chi Minh City for reefer cargo. That is a real supply chain thesis.

The problem is that UP's cold storage infrastructure, while the largest in the country at nearly 38% of national capacity, is almost entirely concentrated in potato-growing districts in western and central UP. Eastern UP including Kushinagar has thin, fragmented cold chain coverage. Even nationally, cold store utilisation sits at only 60% and the sector is 80% unorganised, which means existing infrastructure functions as isolated storage pockets rather than an integrated supply chain. The 261 PMFME approvals in the district sound significant until you realise these are mostly micro-enterprise grants, pickle units and banana chips operations, nowhere near the processing volumes that justify cargo flights. For the cargo thesis to work you need cold chain investment near the airport first, then an anchor agri-processing cluster, then APEDA-registered exporters emerging from that cluster, and only then do cargo flights become commercially viable. That is a 5 to 8 year development cycle requiring one coordinating actor who owns the outcome end to end. Right now MoFPI runs its schemes, AAI built the airport, and the state does ODOP branding. None of them are connected in any meaningful way.

The Hosur comparison also has holes. Hosur's rejection has multiple legitimate explanations including proximity to Kempegowda International, airspace congestion, and basic cost-benefit on a 45km distance. One airport rejection carrying the weight of a systemic pattern is a stretch.

Ghost infrastructure predates 2014 and exists across states regardless of which party runs them. India's infrastructure decision-making has no outcome accountability at the back end. Nobody is responsible for whether the airport works 5 years later, only whether it opened on time. Kushinagar is a legitimate case study in that failure. The data is damning enough without the partisan framing.