Centre announces measures to tackle airport congestion ahead of festivals

The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) on Thursday announced that it is working on multiple measures to mitigate any likelihood of airport congestion during the upcoming festive season. The issue of congestion at the major airports was witnessed in the last year's festive season leading to longer waiting times at various airports.

Among the steps that are being taken to tackle the problem are: additional manpower deployment by Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) in two phases by October 2023 and November 2023, adding more self-baggage drop facilities are airports, use of social media for real-time updates and reinforcement of the Bureau of Immigration (BoI) staff by October 2023.

"To support security infrastructure at airports, additional X-ray machines, check-in counters, and self-baggage drop facilities will be added at airports", the ministry said in a release on Thursday.

"Use of social media platforms to provide real-time updates to passengers to make airport transit seamless. Information regarding enhancement in processing capacity and expansion of security check areas will also be communicated," it added.

Last year, Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia had visited the Delhi Airport to inspect the arrangements and had directed the airport operators at Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Chennai to identify bottlenecks and augment capacity to meet the growing passenger demand.

The main causes of the congestion were: lack of sufficient airport infrastructure, inadequate X-Ray screening machines, bunching of flights particularly at peak hours, and inadequate CISF manpower and immigration manpower to meet the requirement.

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"For improving requisite infrastructure at major airports, various actions were immediately taken. The number of X-ray machines was significantly increased at pre-embarkation security checkpoints. Additional entry gates were set up. Waiting time screens were set at entry and Police Naka Points to apprise passengers and the waiting area was increased. Support manpower was deployed to assist passengers," the ministry said.

"CISF was actively roped in for increasing CISF deployment immediately followed by fresh augmentations. Airports operators were directed to ease out the number of flights during peak hours," it added.

Digi Yatra was launched on December 1 last year. It offers a biometric-enabled travel experience based on facial recognition technology.

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