Calcutta airport uses plastic buckets to collect rainwater leaking through its roof and wooden cases to conceal its embarrassment.

Fliers walking into the integrated terminal on a rainy day like Sunday are greeted by the sight of plastic buckets placed under the roof in at least 25 places across the facility.

Since the leaks won’t be plugged immediately, the Airports Authority of India has procured 25 wooden cases to camouflage its eyesore buckets!

“Plastic buckets in an airport terminal look odd and passengers were also noticing and complaining about it. So we got wooden cases for them,” an airport official said.

Another consignment of wooden cases is on the way lest the roof spring more leaks before monsoon gets over.

Businessman Kumar Aswani was at the airport last week to catch a flight to Delhi when droplets of water falling through the Tagoreana-inscribed ceiling caught his eye.

“It was raining outside and it was raining inside too. I was standing at the U-shaped check-in island number D. In front of a counter, there was a steady trickle from the roof,” Aswani recalled.

The airline employees at the counters looked around helplessly before one of them brought out an empty garbage bin and placed it under the leak.

And this after less than six months of the 1,80,000sq metre integrated terminal being inaugurated with the promise of a “world-class” ambience.

The leaks aren’t happening randomly, and not in a particular area of the terminal. The security hold is the most vulnerable because the roof slopes over it.

SPOT THE BUCKET: A wooden case camouflages a bucket in the first-floor departure lounge

Plastic buckets also need to be placed near the check-in counters, the departure lounge and at times in the ground-floor arrival lounge.

Around 10 litres of water accumulate in each bucket when it rains heavily, which works out to about 250 litres of rainwater entering the terminal through leaks in the roof.

So is bad construction, poor maintenance or a fault in design responsible for the problem?

“There are seven points in the terminal’s roof from where water trickles down. These have been detected and we are rectifying the problem,” said airport director B.P. Sharma. “When the terminal was commissioned, there was no rainfall and so there was no way of knowing if such a problem existed.”

Sharma said the leaks were mostly occurring in the “welded” joints of the roof. “Last month, two such leaks were plugged and engineers assigned to find out ways and means to stop them from recurring.”

The airport director insisted that Calcutta airport’s condition “is not as bad as Delhi’s”, referring to T3 being flooded during the first monsoon showers in June.

Sources said one of the reasons for rainwater leaking through the roof was the damage caused by workers carrying heavy objects through areas not designated for walking. “There are designated walkways on the roofs but workers often tend to take shortcuts while carrying heavy objects. We have submitted photographs to the authorities but nothing has been done about it,” an official alleged.

A senior engineer pointed to the likelihood of a defect in the system of draining out excess rainwater from the roof.

The roof of the new terminal that became operational in March is made of aluminium sheets joined by high-grade welding. The roof is designed to harvest rainwater for use in washrooms and horticulture.

ITD-ITD Cem, an Indo-Thai joint venture company, constructed the integrated terminal with six levels designed to handle 20 million passengers annually. Two levels each are dedicated to arrivals and departures. The remaining two house offices and the baggage handling section.

A leaking roof isn’t the only problem plaguing the facility. After months of shoddy maintenance that Metro had highlighted through a series of reports, the airport recently decided to have two facility management firms to keep its washrooms clean 24x7 and another to maintain a spick-and-span façade.

Have you spotted buckets at the terminal on a rainy day? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com