The city airport has introduced new technologies like the inline baggage X-ray system and opened up several gates for passengers using the DigiYatra app that promises contactless entry into an airport.
But the queues inside and outside the Kolkata airport still look scary.
Most times of the day, there would be a train of people at the security check counters and also at the entrance to the departure level.
Airport sources cited a series of reasons for the long queues: lack of planning, lack of personnel, lack of supervision and lack of efficiency among a section of personnel handling passengers.
Many passengers, whom Metro spoke to over several days, said they had to spend more than half an hour at the two queues before reaching the boarding gate.
Security check queue
A Kolkatan who now lives in Madrid and is in the city on holiday was going to Jaipur and then to Bangalore to visit friends earlier this month. He said he had to stand in the security check queue for 20 minutes.
“At the Bangalore airport, too, there were queues but the waiting time was far less. It seemed the security personnel there were more precise
in guiding passengers,” he said.
At the Kolkata airport, he said, passengers were putting all items on one tray. “When the tray was moving forward, a security person would ask the passenger to remove some of the items, like a jacket, and keep them on a separate tray. This was causing a pile-up,” said the passenger, who requested anonymity.
“In Bangalore, security personnel were guiding passengers at the point where they were putting the belongings on trays.”
At both airports, the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) is in charge of security.
Another passenger, Argha Bhattacharjee, was travelling to Delhi with his wife and son. They were booked on an IndiGo flight at 7.30pm earlier this week.
“There was a separate queue for non-DigiYatra passengers to get the documents verified for the security check. There, it took me 35 minutes to complete the entire check-in process,” said Bhattacharjee.
Airport sources said that during some periods of the day, there was a lack of supervision at the security check counters.
“There is a need for better monitoring to check whether the hand baggage and other items carried by passengers are scanned within the stipulated time,” said an airport official.
According to CISF sources, each piece of hand baggage should be scanned within 20 seconds. But at times the protocol cannot be maintained, said CISF sources
Also, the deployment of personnel should be more rational at the airport, he pointed out.
An airport official said there were four security holds with eight X-ray machines in the domestic section and one hold with two machines in the international section.
“We have readied two more security holds, one each for domestic and international sections, and they will become operational soon. This will improve the situation,” he said.
Terminal entry queue
The entrance to the airport’s domestic departure area gets clogged because of DigiYatra, the app that is supposed to ensure seamless movement of fliers. Some passengers are finding it difficult to use it, said officials. And there are too few entrances for non-DigiYatra passengers.
The DigiYatra facility, introduced at the airport on April 1, 2023, has been installed at all entry gates of the domestic departure section.
A senior official at the Kolkata airport said more than 50 per cent of the eligible passengers are using DigiYatra, which is driven by facial recognition technology.
The airport now handles around 25,000 departure passengers every day, most of whom are eligible for DigiYatra. However, nearly half of them are still opting for the manual process of entering the terminal.
And for those 50 per cent, there are only two gates. Most of the time, only one gate is functional, said sources.
“When we see the queue of non-DigiYatra passengers is getting long, we open the second gate,” said an airport official. “Long queues mostly form during the morning and evening rush hours.
This newspaper spent close to two hours in the domestic departure section of the airport earlier this week. Only gate 1A was open for non-DigiYatra passengers for the entire duration.
Serpentine queues formed at the gate.
All the remaining gates — 1B, 2A and B and 3A and B — were earmarked only for
passengers using DigiYatra.
There is a series of DigiYatra registration-cum-assistance kiosks manned by volunteers and CISF personnel. The volunteers persuaded passengers who did not have the app to install it. They guided the passengers through the installation until they got an entry token.
At the DigiYatra kiosks, most of the personnel deployed to help passengers often find problems in downloading the app because of technical glitches, said sources. That means more delay.
At Gate 1A, around the same time, at least 35 passengers were waiting in the queue. The average waiting time was more than 20 minutes.
Some of the passengers scoffed at only one gate being operational for non-DigiYatra passengers.
Bhattacharjee, who was travelling to Delhi, was the second last person in the queue at 5pm. When he entered through the gate, it was 5.28pm.
“One more gate should be there for passengers like us. If not all the time, at least during the rush hours another gate should be opened,” said Bhattacharjee, who is originally from Tollygunge but now stays in Delhi.
Abhranil Pal, from Howrah, was flying Air India Express to Bangalore. He also had to wait for close to 30 minutes in the queue for non-DigiYatra passengers. “These 30-odd minutes were wasted. I have a lot of pending office work. I could have used this time to finish some of it,” said Pal.
The Kolkatan who now lives in Madrid had to wait for 15 minutes around 4.30pm on another day to enter the terminal.
“I did not have the DigiYatra app, and so was standing in the other queue which was long,” he said.
On his way back to Kolkata from Bangalore, he said, it took him “just a few minutes to enter the terminal as there were far more entry gates.”
