Dum Dum: Scores of trolleys procured by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) for Calcutta airport in April have been grounded already because of quality issues that the manufacturer has contested while suggesting that passengers be fined for "overloading".

More than 100 trolleys have ended up with disfigured wheels after barely three months of use and the casualty list is growing almost every day. But Delite Systems Engineering (India) Pvt Ltd, which had been contracted to supply 4,000 trolleys to Calcutta, denies that there is anything wrong with its product, a senior airport official said.

"We have had to take out the disfigured wheels and so these trolleys, although new, cannot be used for the time being. The manufacturer is replacing the damaged wheels under an annual maintenance contract, but similar problems are appearing in other trolleys," the official said.

The AAI's contract with the Mumbai company was for supply of trolleys to several government-run airports. Of the lot meant for Calcutta, 2,600 have arrived since April.

The airport authorities had a meeting with officials of Delite Systems Engineering on Tuesday to know why the wheels of the new trolleys were getting disfigured.

When Metro called an official of the company in Mumbai the next afternoon, he insisted that there had been no compromise on quality. "The problem lies in how trolleys are being handled (at Calcutta airport). There is no problem with quality," he said.

Availability of trolleys, the most basic of equipment at any airport, has long been a sore point for passengers at the integrated terminal in Calcutta. The problem, partly the result of a mismanaged retrieval system, seemed to have eased when the first set of new trolleys was delivered.

But with so many of them going out of circulation within a few months of being procured, the airport authorities are worried of another shortage.

At Tuesday's meeting, the team from Delite Systems Engineering apparently told the airport management that trolleys should be "handled properly" for them to be durable. One of the suggestions was to put less load on the trolleys, a suggestion possibly unheard of in the annals of air travel.

"The company was suggesting that airport authorities slap a fine on passengers if they load more than two pieces of baggage on a trolley. How is that acceptable? That would be like defeating the purpose of using a trolley," said an official who was at the meeting.

The older trolleys - more than 1,000 of those are still in use - have for years borne the weight of multiple pieces of luggage without their wheels getting disfigured. Several officials whom Metro spoke to said the new trolleys were much lighter than the older ones.

Besides fining passengers for overloading, the trolley manufacturer has advised the airport to change the system of retrieving trolleys and stacking them up inside the terminal.

In the arrival area, contracted retrievers fetch 150 to 200 trolleys from outside the terminal at a time and place them in the racks adjacent to each conveyor belt. While some prefer to push a stack of trolleys, others prefer to pull it. Personnel positioned on either side ensure that a stack stays in line.

The airport has a trolley-retrieval cart that hasn't been repaired since it conked out.

According to Delite Systems Engineering, a stack of trolleys should be pulled rather than pushed. It has also suggested that a stack should have fewer trolleys while being moved.

An airport official said the suggestions were not feasible.

Arun Aviation, a private firm, is the contractor for trolley retrieval.