The runway and the roots: How a 1,000-year-old village fought a ₹27,400 crore airport

At first sight, Ekanapuram resembles a typical Indian village. Roads are narrow. Old tiled-roof houses are slowly giving way to concrete dwellings. Its 2,500-odd residents are pious; many temples dot this village, located 75km west of Chennai. A school here has just completed its 100th anniversary. Most of its residents are farmers while some youngsters have recently started working in the factories of the nearby Sriperumbudur and Oragadam industrial belts.

The villagers are particularly proud of its long history.

“Ekanapuram has been around for centuries,” said 85-year-old M. Krishnamurthy, a farmer whose family has lived in the village for generations. He cites British records documenting the village’s population at 500 in 1882. The Shiva temple, just outside the village, is over 1,000 years old, as is the Kamban Canal, a 43-km-long waterway that drains excess water from the nearby Palar river into the sea, he added.

But the village runs the risk of being completely erased from the map. The Tamil Nadu government, in August 2022, announced Parandur as the site for Chennai’s new greenfield airport. When the airport drawings were made public, Ekanapuram, near Parandur, was placed right between the two proposed runways.

The otherwise docile villagers turned aggressive. They launched a protest, agitating continuously for over 1,100 days. They contacted many political parties as well as environmental groups. They argued that Parandur was not an ideal location for an airport—it would destroy the many water bodies surrounding the village, subsume fertile agricultural land, and disrupt the canal system that prevents flooding in Chennai.

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government, which was in power in Tamil Nadu from 2021 until May this year, tried to convince the villagers about the new airport’s importance to the state’s economic prospects. It offered over ₹2.5 crore per acre of land and promised the villagers pucca or fully-built houses elsewhere. But the people of Ekanapuram refused to budge.

Things turned in their favour when actor Joseph Vijay formed the Tamizhaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) in 2025 and made Parandur his first field-level protest. He promised that the airport project would be scrapped if TVK came to power. And it did. Though an official order is yet to be issued, TVK ministers have announced that the state government is looking for alternative sites to host a second airport for Chennai.

Ekanapuram is not celebrating yet but there is relief on the faces of its residents. They are aware that the state government is under immense pressure from the Centre and industry bodies to proceed with the project as Chennai’s existing airport, among India’s oldest, cannot handle future demand.

The project and the protests underpin the tension a democratic country like India faces, where economic development and the larger good appear to clash with personal rights, identity, and history. Its future will probably be closely watched by the industry as a case study on the ease and speed of doing business even in an industrial state like Tamil Nadu.

The need

The current airport in Chennai is located at Meenambakkan, in the heart of the city. This airport cannot expand as adequate land is unavailable nearby—a river runs alongside the airport. Its present passenger handling capacity is 30 million a year and is expected to increase to 35 million after an ongoing ‘phase II’ project is completed. In 2025-26, the airport handled 23 million passengers and experts worry that it would run out of capacity in a few years given the rise in air travel.

That apart, the scope to increase aircraft movements—landing and take-off—from the current 450 a day is limited in the absence of a parallel runway. Meanwhile, in recent years, the Chennai airport’s ranking among travellers has fallen due to lesser amenities as compared with those offered by newer airports.

Consequently, from being the gateway to south India, Chennai airport has fallen to sixth place in the country in terms of passenger traffic. The Bengaluru and Hyderabad airports, with their new swanky facilities expected to eventually handle at least 70 million passengers a year, besides an enormous amount of cargo, have edged past Chennai.

Tamil Nadu has set a high target of becoming a trillion-dollar economy soon—its gross state domestic product in 2025-26 was $420 billion. A large airport with efficient cargo handling capacity is key, particularly because of growing electronics exports. Tourism is another area identified by the government to boost economic growth.

Till recently, tourists entered south India through Chennai but they do so from Bengaluru these days. Passenger traffic from Chennai has risen at a slower pace compared to both Bengaluru and Hyderabad, data from the Airport Authority of India shows. Indeed, Chennai has underperformed India. While passengers handled by the city’s airport grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.5% between 2022-23 and 2025-26, passenger growth across India averaged 6.5% in the same period.

“Airports are economic engines for growth and an important infrastructure to have,” said Ravichandran Purushothaman, chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry (southern region) and president of engineering company Danfoss India. “By not having an efficient airport, Tamil Nadu is already losing out to its neighbours on investment.”

The shortlist

The search for a new airport began way back in 1999. Sriperumbudur was initially eyed as a possible location but it turned into an industrial hub housing facilities for global companies such as Hyundai Motor Co., Saint-Gobain, Foxconn, Samsung and others. After years of search, in fits and starts, four other sites—Parandur, Pannur, Padalam and Tiruporur—were identified.

Pannur and Parandur were shortlisted in 2022 after technical and feasibility studies. The DMK government decided to go with Parandur as land acquisition and rehabilitation needs were less. Only 12 villages were affected and of them, just three would see complete dislocation. The location was close to the upcoming Chennai-Bengaluru expressway.

An announcement was made in August 2022 by then chief minister M.K. Stalin and the ministry of civil aviation granted an ‘in-principle’ approval in April 2025. The proposed airport, spread over 5,746 acres with an estimated cost of ₹27,400 crore, was expected to handle 100 million passengers annually. Work on the airport was expected to be completed in eight years. Metro rail connectivity from Chennai city was also planned.

Another David Vs Goliath

What the state government had not factored in was the resolve of Ekanapuram to protect its history and heritage.

“It is not very often that a small village takes on a determined government and succeeds,” said G. Sundarrajan, co-ordinator of Poovulagin Nanbargal (friends of the earth), a Chennai-based environmental organization that supported the villagers. “How they went about their protest is a case study for others.”

As a first step, the people of Ekanapuram decided to put the interest of the village above everything else. Caste and political affiliations were strictly kept outside. This helped them beat efforts to split them on caste lines by pitting the scheduled caste and most backward communities against each other. A committee with a wide representation from the village was formed to spearhead the agitation.

The protests lasted continuously for over 1,150 days. They took various forms—fasting, road blockades, tonsuring of heads, and agitation in the water bodies and farmlands. The initial days of protest saw little traction. The villagers then reached out to political parties. Naam Thamizhar Katchi was the first to respond and its leader Seeman visited them and offered his support. Over time, more than 40 political leaders and many environmentalists, including Medha Patkar, visited the village.

As the protests gained support, the DMK government was forced to meet the villagers for talks in early 2023. It promised to set up a committee under former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer S. Machendranathan to address their concerns. But the committee’s report was never made public.

“I put in an RTI (right-to-information) request for the report and the response I got was that the contents of the report will affect development in Tamil Nadu,” said G. Subramaniyan, president of the committee formed to protest against the airport project.

Soon, the government began acquiring land. Over a two-and-a-half-year period, 1,700 acres were acquired. A ‘special project’ status helped the state to accelerate land acquisition. “No one from Ekanapuram offered land for acquisition. We told the government that if any official enters our village for it, we will self-immolate and hug the official,” said G. Janarthanan, a member of the protest committee who works as a machine operator in a factory in Oragadam.

The villagers also boycotted the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Only 21 of the 1,400 voters cast their vote.

The state government, meanwhile, filed 15 civil cases against the protesting villagers for disrupting law and order. The protest committee president, Subramaniyan, who was a supervisor at the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (Tasmac), lost his job temporarily for leading the protest.

‘Unsuitable location’

The villagers chose not to respond to provocations. “We channelized our anger and emotions into building a strong case against the project,” recalled Subramaniyan.

Parandur, the villagers argued, was not the ideal location for the new airport. As much as 27% of the area chosen comprised water bodies. The government saw that as a boon as it obviated the need for acquiring land. The environmentalists sounded alarm as its destruction would expose Chennai to flooding. “Water bodies to the west of Chennai store flood waters and protect the city from flooding. Their destruction to build an airport is a bad idea,” said Sundarrajan.

Also, 2,000 acres of fertile farmland, where three cycles of crops are grown every year, would be destroyed, displacing 1,005 households, according to the villagers.

“Can’t the government find any other place to locate the airport?” asked Janarthanan, the protest committee member.

The villagers also pointed out that the proposed airport would destroy 7km of the Kamban canal, a historic canal system that drains excess water from Palar river and feeds 84 water bodies that are used to irrigate land in the region. It eventually relays the flood waters into the sea.

Villagers of Parandur are not the only ones fighting against a new airport in the country. The Maharashtra government recently put land acquisition for Gadchiroli airport on hold after large-scale protests by farmers against using fertile agricultural land for infrastructure and industrial projects.

Now, some experts believe TVK will scrap the Parandur project as it is too politically invested in it.

A tough choice

The TVK government has been careful to say that it is not against development and will look for an alternative site for the new airport.

“It is easier said than done,” said a senior government official who was involved in shortlisting Parandur. It is not about getting 4,000 acres of flat land. The identified land must align with existing assets such as the Chennai airport, Tambaram Air Force base, and Arakonam Naval base. Their runways have to be parallel. The chosen land should not conflict with the Kalpakkam nuclear power plant, Vedanthangal bird sanctuary or Pulicat lake that surround Chennai. Whichever land is chosen, it will have a fair share of water bodies and displacement of people. It took decades to shortlist Parandur and the process would have to start all over again if the proposed airport project is scrapped.

But a few question the need for another airport for Chennai. “What is the need for a new airport with a capacity to handle 100 million people?” asked Sundarrajan. “If Bengaluru and Hyderabad needed new airports, it is because they were using the defence airport earlier. Chennai has a large commercial airport.”

He further argued that Tamil Nadu, like Kerala, can go for decentralized aviation. Airports in Coimbatore, Tiruchirapalli, Salem and other places in Tamil Nadu can be expanded, allowing for traffic to be spread across multiple airports, Sundarrajan said.

Some seek other solutions. This includes expanding the existing airport by acquiring land on the far side of the river or acquiring the defence land that presently houses the Officers Training Academy. Others suggested moving the existing cargo terminal to make way for additional passenger handling capacity at Chennai airport. A new dedicated cargo airport can be created some distance away or the cargo handling can be shifted to nearby airports such as Puducherry in the south and Nellore in the north—not too far from the state’s industrial clusters.

Can the TVK government balance people’s interest and the state’s developmental needs? That will be among Joseph Vijay’s first real test in governance.