First-world aspiration, third-world feel

WORM'S EYE VIEW

One thing has changed at Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA). The ubiquitous information-screens inform us that it is now possible to take pictures inside the terminal. Earlier, this used to be a punishable offence that could lead to anything up to and including, a stint in Tihar for the guilty cameraperson.

It is an entirely different matter that nobody in their senses would waste either film or digital storage on recording IGIA for posterity. Few among the lakhs, who stand and wait endlessly inside its various holding areas ever bother to pull out their cams.

IGIA is not, to put it mildly, a sight for sore eyes, unlike say, the gleaming expanses of Changi, Dubai or Schipol. Nor is it a grand symphony of squalor, like the broken ruins of Sheremetyevo or Saddam International. It is merely a depressing rectangular box, set amidst a backdrop of flyovers, "flyunders" and car parks.

Apart from the directive allowing the taking of pictures, little has changed. The airport was originally designed with zero tolerance for aesthetics or logistics and negative weightage for commercial considerations or creature comforts.

Any passenger at IGIA can reasonably assume a wait-time of 45 minutes in the immigration queue. If the number of international flights increases, the average wait-time for the passengers in immigration will soon exceed the average in-flight time.

The counters in the immigration hall are cramped "" it is physically impossible to pack more counters into that space. Foreigners and Indians queue up any-old-how. There's just one counter to deal with people of Indian origin (PIOs), which means the poor things spend even longer than everyone else.

It may be possible to intelligently use data pertaining to arrivals/departures and passenger demographics to speed up the immigration process by assigning counters on a dynamic basis to various types of passengers. But things won't really improve without relocating to a bigger space.

The logistics of other essential services also creak. The baggage belts overload at "rush-hour" when two or three flights land around the same time. When that happens, it takes a very long time for everyone to retrieve their respective baggage.

There is a perennial shortage of trolleys in the baggage area. The duty-free shop is tucked away in a little corner and likely to be missed at first or second glance. The customs guys scramble around, stepping on their own toes for lack of space and facilities.

The outside of the terminal is a complete nightmare with people milling around continuously, especially when the lounges are barred for security reasons, as they so frequently are.

There is often no space to park in any of the car-parks. This means insane circular drives around the airport's environs while waiting for somebody to land and pass immigration.

IGIA is the first point-of-contact for foreigners. It is difficult to convince anyone who has just spent 90 minutes on his feet passing through immigration, retrieving baggage and running the gauntlet of customs that India is shining.

It is impossible to envisage how bad the situation will get if say, the number of flights into IGIA are doubled. And, things are little better at India's other airports.

One often wonders how systems' failure of this order resulted. After all, the services required at international airports were well-known long before the terminal was designed. It would have been easy to project and design for required capacities. But that didn't happen. As a result, there is a long-term bottleneck in the aviation sector.

Similar bottlenecks are evident in the customer interfaces of various utilities. There are no credit-card facilities at railway stations (though you can buy a ticket online using plastic).

There is no way to pay a utility bill directly by use of plastic. The helpdesks in various telephone services are past masters at the art of putting people on hold.

These are the little things that make the difference between first-world and third-world environments. Of course, first-world helpdesks are even better at putting people on hold. But all too frequently, those are manned by Indians sitting in Gurgaon!