Airport Director Opens Chowk Banaras in Staff Colony

Airport Director Puneet Gupta inaugurated Chowk Banaras on Thursday, 27 August 2026, inside the staff colony of Lal Bahadur Shastri International Airport — a library-and-cafe, a boutique and a dairy booth, to be run by women, for residents of the colony and their neighbours. It is a campus-colony opening, not a passenger-terminal facility.

The library and cafe are one unit. The cafe is to serve Banarasi food. The library side is for study and conversation. The boutique and the dairy booth sit with that pair as the other two units Gupta opened on Thursday. Women are to run all of them. No headcount of those women was released with the inauguration, and none is on the record.

Colony and neighbours are the stated users. Travellers in the terminal are not. Babatpur’s passenger building is a different map. Chowk Banaras is on the staff-housing campus of the same airport, at a walking distance for families who live there, not at check-in.

Gupta’s inauguration is the official act. The four functions — library, cafe, boutique, dairy booth — are the inventory. Banarasi food, study and conversation are the cafe-library brief. Women as operators is the staffing rule. Neighbours as well as colony residents is the catchment. Those are the facts on the Thursday opening.

No passenger-throughput claim was attached to the event. No shop-rent figure, no menu card and no library-catalogue size were published. The dairy booth is a booth, not a plant. The boutique is a boutique, not a crafts emporium with a published stall count. What opened is what the Director named.

Staff colonies at Indian airports sit behind the operational fence, on the same estate as the runway but on the housing grid. A library-cafe there is a welfare room for people who already live on campus. It does not alter the arrivals hall, the visitor-area rooms, or the public concourse. Thursday’s event should be read on that grid.

Women running the units is the employment line that was given. It is a rule of who will operate the rooms. It is not a published payroll. A number of women would have to come from the Director or from airport administration. Thursday’s briefing did not supply one.

The Banarasi-food cafe is the local cut of the room: not a generic canteen ticket, and not a terminal food court. Study and conversation are why the library is paired with it rather than being a locked reading stack. The boutique and the dairy booth complete a small campus chowk — books and talk, food, clothes, milk — for the colony and the houses next to it.

Gupta opened Chowk Banaras on 27 August in the LBS International Airport staff colony: library and cafe together, boutique, dairy booth, Banarasi food, study and conversation, women to run the rooms, colony and neighbours to use them. That is the public list from the Director’s inauguration.

The passenger terminal was not the venue. The staff colony was.