If you go to the moon, you’ll find a Malayali’s tea stall there. It might be a light-hearted joke, but it speaks volumes about the far-reaching presence of the Malayali diaspora across the globe.
The wanderlust of Keralites knows no bounds, whether it is embarking on a journey to distant lands for work opportunities, pursuing education in foreign universities, or simply indulging in leisurely escapades. Kerala’s four international airports -Kochi, Calicut, Trivandrum, and Kannur- are a testament to this, having emerged as bustling gateways and handling more international passengers than all the airports in any south Indian State.
Interestingly, only Delhi and Mumbai airports, with 1.40 crore and 1.04 crore international passengers respectively during April- December 2023, had rivalled the Kerala airports owing to a myriad of factors, including bilateral air service agreements between India and other nations. The Cochin International Airport had 36.95 lakh international passengers, much higher than either Bengaluru (34.66 lakhs) or Hyderabad (31.26 lakhs), though Chennai airport with a 43.81 lakh tops the list in south India. Calicut International Airport had 19.47 lakh passengers, and Trivandrum with 15.07 lakh is not far behind either, while Kannur had 5.69 lakh passengers during the same period. Being a State with four airports within 600-km and highest population density in the country, this may not come as a surprise.
