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I took the 4.50pm Indigo flight to Delhi on Thursday evening.
The moment I entered the new terminal, it seemed fantastic. It had a great view. But then I realised that the whole place had dust. Work was still going on. There was no signage, no directional signage and why they were not up, I don’t know. They’ve got the signage on the toilet but you don’t know how to get there.
You’re supposed to have a lot of cafes, but there was only one after you cross security. Nothing before that. The second was in progress. There were even wires running across while you checked in.
My point is if anything has to be corrected, do it during a non-operational hour. Or mask it. There are ways to do it. You look around and you see a guy with a bucket of paint!
I went to the toilet. It was a miserable mess. There was water all over the place. People had spat paan in the basin already!
I asked the maintenance guy and he said, “Sir, there’s 150,000 square metre of cleaning to be done and only 120 people to do it.”
We got the drinking water behind the toilet, which is fine. But no one knows how to get there. A small piece of paper — 75mm X 200mm — has ‘Drinking Water’ written on it, with an arrow.
I didn’t see many dustbins either. You need a dustbin every five metres.
I feel the challenge is going to be how to keep the dust out.
Almost all of the airport is glass and façade cleaning is a 24x7 job, non-stop. One whole glazing was shattered, though still standing. That’s okay because glass cracks and it takes time until the replacement piece arrives.
But I was digging for information and the maintenance guy told me that the guy who was doing the glass had run away! I don’t know what he meant by that — whether he’s not working for them anymore or what. I mean you have to get the basics like the AMC (annual maintenance contract) right.
I sat on a chair and it had a cheap finish like stainless steel. The logo of one of the chairs was already gone.
The airport has noisy Schindler escalators and there were three engineers there. The escalator’s teeth had not been cleaned.
Finally, after going through this whole airport, we still had to take a bus to the aircraft! Whatever happened to the aerobridges?
The last word? The airport is fantastic, the check-in is fantastic. They’ve done a fantastic job — it’s spacious, it’s nice. Yes, it’s better than Delhi and Mumbai. And it’s going to be all right. But we have to get the basics right from Day One. It’s difficult to build a Taj Mahal but it’s even more difficult to maintain it.
Note: The airport is swanky, it’s brilliant, my message to people of Calcutta is: let’s keep it clean. If you see somebody doing something wrong, point it out. As citizens, we should have a sense of duty towards our city.
[Sanjeev Mehra is the GM, operations, CESC Properties Ltd. A specialist in managing large public spaces, he was vice-president, operations, of the South City Mall before this]
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