Officials have all but ruled out Dhana airstrip and are now scouting roughly 200 acres to serve Bina's growing refinery and petrochemical business.
The Dhana airstrip plan is effectively dead. Madhya Pradesh's aviation department has asked the Sagar collector to start hunting for a fresh site, and this time the search is centred somewhere between Sagar and Bina.
The problem with Dhana was always geography. People familiar with the matter said the strip sits ringed by hills, and there's no way to extend the runway on either side without running straight into rock. Years of planning around that one location have hit a wall that no amount of paperwork was going to move.
So the priorities have shifted. Bina is the reason why.
The town is turning into a serious industrial hub, anchored by an integrated refinery and petrochemical complex that's expected to pull in heavy business traffic over the coming years. An airport that can serve both Sagar and Bina makes more sense on paper than one boxed in by hills with no room to grow. The department is now working on the assumption that roughly 200 acres will be needed to make the project viable.
Additional chief secretary Sanjay Shukla, when asked about it, told the Free Press Journal that the collector has been directed to keep the region's future airport needs in mind while identifying land, so that the Airports Authority of India can be looped in once a workable site is found. That's the current stage: identification, not construction. No location has been finalised, and no timeline has been set for when AAI will get a formal proposal.
Sagar isn't the only district going through this exercise. Shivpuri's administration has just landed on its second possible site for a proposed airport there, after the first option got stuck for a much simpler reason: it sat too close to Madhav National Park, and that kind of proximity to protected forest land tends to end conversations quickly in aviation planning.
The aviation department is expected to send a survey team to inspect the new Shivpuri site, checking whether the parcel actually meets the space and clearance requirements an airport project demands. That survey hasn't happened yet.
Both cases point to the same bottleneck slowing down Madhya Pradesh's push to expand regional air connectivity: finding land that clears every box, flat enough, big enough, and far enough from forests, hills or anything else that can kill a project years into planning. Sagar and Shivpuri are now effectively starting their site searches over.
What happens next depends on how fast local administrations can turn up land that survives scrutiny. Until AAI receives a proposal for Sagar and until the Shivpuri survey team files its report, neither project moves off the drawing board.
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