ARSHAD Sethi stands at Sialkot airport, waiting for a Shaheen Air flight from Muscat. Smoking a cigarette, he watches his five-year-old daughter chasing butterflies in the small, lush lawn. They have come to pick up his elder brother who works for an oil company in Oman.
“It’s very convenient having an airport half an hour’s drive from home when you have almost everyone from the family working abroad,” says Sethi smiling. “Otherwise, the nearest airport in Lahore is almost four hours’ drive away.”
The number of families here to receive relatives grows quickly. A few people have come from as far as Kharian, more than an hour and a half’s drive away. “Our family has been using this airport since the Muscat-Sialkot flight became operational,” says 18-year-old Ashfar Butt, who is here to receive his father.
Sialkot International Airport, which became operational in 2007, was built by a group of local business community members on a self-help basis. It is the first privately owned public airport in the country and in South Asia, with the rolling annual total of passengers surpassing the 700,000 mark last year, according to Mohammad Nawaz Chaudhry, its general manager.
“Sialkot airport is easily accessible to people from Sialkot, Narowal, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Mandi Bahauddin, Hafizabad, Kharian and Jhelum,” he says. “Even people from Lahore and Islamabad sometimes use it. International traffic growth continues to rise fast.”
Currently, three domestic and five Gulf airlines are operating 52 passenger flights (one domestic and 51 international) from here. A few more flights on both sectors are expected to be added by the end of this year. “The business opportunity is attracting airlines,” says Fazal Jilani, a businessman and director of the Sialkot International Airport Limited (Sial), the company that owns the airport.
Additionally, Qatar Airways operates two cargo freighters twice a week. “The airport is handling 1,200/1,300 tonnes of cargo every month,” says Jilani. “Cargo flights have enabled exporters from Sialkot and nearby cities to move their export shipments to destination ports in Europe in as little as 24 hours and helped us triple Sialkot’s exports to $1.8 billion from around $600 million in 2003. This is a huge achievement, isn’t it?”
The airport is just one feather in the cap of Sialkot’s business community. Starting with the establishment of a dry port on a self-help basis in the mid-1980s, businessmen have been contributing 0.25 per cent of their export revenues for improving the city’s road, sewerage and other infrastructure under the City Development Package since the late 1990s. The Punjab government contributes twice the funds collected by the businessmen, vastly improving the road and sewerage, as well as industrial infrastructure.
“It was the late Seth Mohammad Iqbal who motivated businessmen to cooperate and contribute money for constructing the dry port as we faced immense problems in timely shipment of our cargo from Karachi,” says Ijaz Khokar, who exports martial arts uniforms. “Customs officials at the Karachi port would give preference to the bigger exporters from Karachi and Lahore and our shipments, smaller in size, were often delayed.”
After developing the dry port and improving the city’s roads and sewerage, the city’s business community thought of building an airport. “Sialkot is a city of entrepreneurs and many have to travel a lot,” adds Khokar. “Travelling from Lahore or Rawalpindi is highly inconvenient and costly. Hence, over 250 businessmen contributed Rs5 million each to undertake the project in 2003.”
When a group of businessmen met then president Gen Pervez Musharraf with a proposal for the airport, many wanted him to reject their request. “We never wanted the government to undertake this project. We always wanted to do it with our own money,” says Jilani. “As expected, Musharraf rejected the proposal, saying the airport would be economically unviable, but allowed us to build it with our own money.” He adds that there were times when “we faced difficulties in raising enough funds but at the end we were able to complete it. Today, it is one of the best and most profitable airports in the country”.
The success of airport project has led the city’s businessmen to set up their own airline — Sial Air. The company has already been launched, and is expected to apply for a licence next month. Flight operations will be launched over the next year with three aircraft operating on the domestic sectors. Later, they plan to expand its operation on international routes and add three more aircraft.
“Money for the airline project is no problem. We already have commitments from 250 investors, each investing Rs10m. The success of the airport is attracting many overseas Pakistanis to invest large amounts in Sial Air,” contends Jilani.
Sialkot’s businessmen, mostly small- to medium-size entrepreneurs, are proud of what they have done for their city and its people. The people too recognise it. “What our business community has done is remarkable and unprecedented, at least in Pakistan. We are grateful to them. Had they left it for the government to do its job, we might still have broken roads and no airport,” Sethi says as he walks away to his daughter.
Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2016