Sindhu Bhattacharya

New Delhi: The Delhi International Airport (DIAL) is in a mess, but the GMR group-led consortium modernising it promises a change for the better by next month.

Blaming the current problems — serpentine queues that begin at the airport entrance and continue through baggage screening to immigration counters, besides the lack of some basic passenger amenities — on manpower shortage, GMR has sought 1,400 additional CISF personnel and 150 more immigration officers from the government.

Kiran Kumar Grandhi, group director, GMR said after making a presentation on the state of affairs at DIAL to Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia that the airport was facing problems because, “with a capacity to handle 12 million passengers, it is handling 24 million. This problem is being solved through various measures.”

Ironically, GMR’s assurance on improving the situation at DIAL comes even as it has begun discussions with the civil aviation ministry on charging an airport development fee (ADF) from each passenger soon to fund the expansion and modernisation of the airport.

The developer has proposed an additional levy of Rs 1,000 for international passengers and Rs 200 for domestic passengers and the monies thus collected will help bridge the Rs 2,750 crore funding gap this project is facing.

The first phase of the modernisation work is scheduled to be completed only by 2010.

In effect, therefore, DIAL is asking passengers to pay for services it would provide in future.

But according to GMR officials, several improvements would be made in Terminal 2 by June. These include increasing immigration counters in departure from 28 to 52 so that total counters including arrivals go up from 56 to 100; increasing check-in counters from 78 to 100; almost doubling security channels from eight to 15 and door-frame metal detector gates from 10 to 22.

Also, to address complaints of long traffic jams, GMR has agreed to widen the drop-off area by 18 feet, besides posting traffic marshals and customer care executives to help with e-ticketing, etc.

By August this year, Delhi will have the third runway operational. A refurbished international terminal would be available by July and a new domestic terminal would be added by November. Asked if the DIAL project was facing a cost overrun, Grandhi said “we will know of any overruns only once the project is completed.”

Source : DNA