Calcutta: Kalyani in Nadia is among the places in Calcutta's neighbouring districts the state government is considering for setting up a second city airport, sources said on Wednesday.

The Airports Authority of India (AAI) recently held two meetings with the state government - one last week - on availability of land for the airport. The AAI told the government the new airport should be ready by 2030, an official briefed on the meeting said.

"In last week's meeting, the government agreed to start scouting for land. Ideally, the land should be within 30-40 km of Calcutta and should not be more than 100km away," AAI chairman Guruprasad Mohapatra said at NSCBI Airport on Wednesday.

Sources said the government was looking for a plot spread across 1,300-1,500 acres. Kalyani is on the radar.

"We are looking for land in adjoining districts. Kalyani is barely 50km from Calcutta. The town has research institutes such as the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics. An AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences) is also coming up there," a source said.

Several factors, acquisition problem being one of them, have to be taken into consideration before a plot is finalised.

Acquiring land for infrastructure projects has been a problem in Bengal. All upcoming Metro projects have been delayed by years because of land logjam.

Sources said the AAI officials' assertion that the NSCBI Airport would reach a saturation point by 2030, and fail to handle demand after that, nudged the government into looking for land for a second airport.

"We have told the state government that the new airport should be ready by then. Now, the (existing integrated) terminal is handling 18.5 million passengers. It will cross 26 million by 2030," said Mohapatra.

The state government had earlier suggested that the airport be set up in Andal, near Durgapur and around 200km from Calcutta. But the AAI has rejected the proposal.

It takes almost three-and-a-half hours to reach Andal from the city by road.

"The second airport will also need multi-modal connectivity, including Metro. Andal cannot have such connectivity with Calcutta," said Mohapatra.

He said the AAI has made similar requests to other states. Mumbai has a second airport coming up in Navi Mumbai. Near Delhi, an airport (Jewar) is coming up in Greater Noida. The Tamil Nadu government has zeroed in on a plot near Chennai for a second airport.

Not just passenger handling, Mohapatra said, the Calcutta airport is also set to battle constraints in handling flights. The airport has two runways but they cannot be used for parallel operations because the minimum distance between them is below the statutory requirement. The runways are 282m from each, compared with the requirement of 760m.

The airport earlier used to handle 35 flights an hour. Now, it's 40. A team from Denmark's Copenhagen airport will come to Calcutta next week to conduct a study on how to enhance capacity with the existing runway conditions.

"Copenhagen has similar configurations like Calcutta. It has two airports that can't be used for parallel operations. But still they handle more flights," said Mohapatra.