Solve the airport mess
Each afternoon, a few thousands Goans, expats, tourists and visitors from the rest of India go through the agony of passing through Dabolim airport. It is a painful process, with flights bottle-necked in the afternoon hours, few landings taking place in the morning and overall chaos prevailing. In the absence of good transport connections with the airport (apart from private taxis), even getting to and from Dabolim is an excessively costly process.
To our contractor-friendly politicians, the solution is to build a second airport. What a windfall. Not only are there going to be many more contacts to dole out, but those privy to ‘insider information’ from the business of governance can easily corner tracts of land—around the new airport area— and making a small killing later.
For years together, two Central government bodies have been playing a shameless pass-the-buck game. The Airport Authority of India and the Indian Navy swear that everything is fine from their side, but suggest that it’s ‘the other’ party that could be at fault.
While this happens, Goa’s own politicians have maintained a mute pose, and an unstudied silence. They do not seem to care if the people whom they claim represent are inconvenienced or made to pay for their (the politicians’) inefficiency in setting things right.
Check what flyers have to say about the Dabolim airport, and one will find complaints aplenty. The airport is kept tiny, and expected to cater to a growing traffic, including new flights. Facilities are substandard; it’s little consolation that they somehow work better than many other Indian airports. Security is lax. At the same time, there are too many “chiefs” in the security service, which makes this slow, bureaucratic and yet unsafe process. As one commentator on conditions at Dabolim put it, “the bureaucracy is ridiculous, slow and cumbersome. By the time you get out of the airport you are just fed up, tired and want a shower and a meal.”
Security leads to the departure longue which “is one large, untidy room full of passengers”. Washroom facilities have been called filthy. You might need to walk onto the tarmac, though there are a few buses that now take you there. Inspite of this sad state of affairs, Dabolim seems to be permanently under repairs. All the money spent into it has little effect on improving the quality of service. There have been little changes with Dabolim over the years, though the number of flights increases year on year. Check-in and security takes time, at least an hour. There have been even complaints about the abysmal rate of exchange at the airport, which is only to be expected in a monopoly-type of situation. “Duty-free” is very expensive too. Incoming passengers have said that they still have to queue for over an hour “before anyone turned up to get you through departure” in a slow and labourious process. But the most serious problem is the way the questionable Naval control of the airport—nobody seems to know how it got taken over by the Navy after 1961 — blocks more flight slots for “civilian” aircrafts.
In the past week, the Airport Authorities of India (AAI) and Indian Navy said they discussed the proposed work on the airport terminal building and parallel taxi bay. Officials talk in terms of “tenders”, “fruitful meetings” and the like. All this is fine. But for the passengers, hard-pressed to get in and out of Goa despite paying a small fortune by way of airfares and airport taxes, words are not enough. Neither are promises. What is needed is solutions.
We have been hearing far too much for far too long. It reminds of one of the saying: the operation was a success, but the patient died! What is the point of so many meetings and assurances, if the quality of the airport at Dabolim simply won’t improve in a perceptible manner?
