Around 334 families who gave up land for Noida International Airport say they’re still waiting for the jobs they were promised, even as the Jewar facility begins commercial operations. The families had been told during the first two phases of land acquisition that they could choose employment with the airport concessionaire instead of cash compensation. Years later, many say that the offer hasn’t materialised.
The promise, residents say, dates back to 2019. Officials had assured project-affected families of jobs with Yamuna International Airport Private Limited (YIAPL), the Zurich Airport International subsidiary operating the airport. Now those families say they’re being directed toward roles with private vendors instead. Their objection is specific: vendor jobs pay less, offer no stability, and skip statutory benefits like provident fund, ESI, and medical cover.
That gap between a direct YIAPL role and a third-party placement isn’t a small one. It’s the difference between a covered, secure job and a contract gig, which is exactly what the families say they were promised they wouldn’t get.
Several protesters near the site said they want the direct, stable employment that was promised during land acquisition. The personal stories carry weight. One resident from Banwaripur village, who gave up 10 acres, holds an MTech in automobile engineering and says he’s been waiting for years, with a February meeting producing an assurance but no follow-up. A farmer from Dayanatpur said his elder son left a Deputy General Manager role in Gurgaon in 2020 to return home for an airport job that never came.
NIAL, for its part, points to a structured hiring system for affected families. The agency said three recruitment drives in late 2025 drew over 300 candidates and produced 24 offer letters. It added that roughly 180 youths had registered on a new job portal, and that skill training had begun at ITI Jewar, where 24 of 28 trained candidates received offers from partner firms. Officials noted that the airport’s first phase would create over 5,000 direct jobs, all carrying minimum wages and statutory benefits, with a joint committee of NIAL, YIAPL, and district officials supervising placements.
The families aren’t satisfied with those numbers. Many claim the promise of priority employment was made in writing under the rehabilitation policy, and they say they’ll keep protesting until direct jobs come through. This isn’t the first flashpoint, either. In December 2025, a recruitment drive turned chaotic when candidates were told their hiring would be routed through a placement agency, and Jewar MLA Dhirendra Singh later called their demand for direct employment “legitimate.”
The dispute lands on a familiar fault line in India’s large infrastructure projects: the distance between rehabilitation promises made during acquisition and the employment that actually shows up once construction ends. Phase I of the airport was built at an investment of around ₹11,200 crore under a public-private partnership, and the Uttar Pradesh government has long projected that the project would generate over 100,000 jobs across its full development. For the families who handed over ancestral cropland, the question is narrower. Whether the jobs they were specifically promised count toward that headline figure, or whether they’ve been quietly redefined as vendor contracts.
The contrast became hard to miss on June 15, when villagers who’d given land boarded the airport’s first passenger flight to Lucknow. One farmer on that flight, who said he’d given 30 bighas of land, told reporters he was glad to see the development but added that the promised job still hadn’t come.
