Delhi Airport Congestion: Utterly brutally crowded Indian infrastructure

Passengers complained about serpentine queues at security checks and unhelpful staff. (Image credit: @bhaskarbluesky/Twitter)

The most-tweeted complaint (in India) the past few days might be about the crowded Indian airports. Complaints poured in from celebrities, from influencers, and from average travellers like you and I. Complaints that it took hours to get into the airport, to the airline counter, to security check — this when many flights within India are less than 90 minutes flying time.

But then, in the name of god and claimed usage of AI (Artificial Intelligence, not Air India!), the social-media handles of airlines and airports mess it up further. ‘Pls DM us your contact details. We will get back to you’. Really! Airports and airlines first need to fix their protocols, and improve their standard operating procedures to be in tune with passenger capacity.

Infrastructure And Euphoria

Infrastructure development is not simply having the physical hardware in place. Building new airports, roads, and expressways is great. While we spend billions of rupees in acquiring land and actual project costs, why do we cringe on smaller aspects of upgrading equipment, training staff, etc.?

But then each of these construction projects have to be in sync with other related projects before being built. For example, what use of a swanky airport with multiple car lanes to enter, if it has a traffic jam at the airport entrance? It not only creates a mess within the airport, but also in that city. Did the planners forget to do a traffic flow analysis with the local traffic police? Do we even have town planning as a principled science?

Services planning is an often overlooked part in India’s urban planning. Is our mindset based on the assumption that people would be thankful for the merciful physical infrastructure provided to them, and would willingly go through the pain of the process of using it? If only we add a measure to such wasted human hours of spending in clogged public infrastructure to our GDP, we might do better in changing these?

It is one thing to look at the infrastructural progress we’ve achieved, and another to blindly sing praises of it, without being critical of the crippling bottlenecks.

Service Providers & Objectives

Not surprisingly, airport officials blame the lack of sufficient check-in and security counters, more passengers, and limited security staff. The biggest challenge is a reactive mindset — ‘let’s reduce flights in peak time. It will reduce the crowding at airports’. That is regressive thinking, and akin to the licence-raj era, only here we’ll be telling the public when to fly.

Most of our bigger cities have airports managed by private enterprises. Isn’t it their objective to provide passengers better services? Can’t these for-profit organisations have a defined objective of passenger movement time from airport-door to airplane-door? That would make them work proactively with governments, various ministries, and airlines in arriving at a positive solution.

As much as we have to build newer airports across India, we need to keep our main airports, which carry bulk of passenger capacity, at ship-shape. At a time when India’s travel and tourism sector is roaring back to pre-COVID-19 levels and beyond, it is only prudent to get the act right. Getting transportation infrastructure at its optimal best must be a natural corollary.

The situation without our cities and towns is no better. Traffic jams are a norm, not an exception. We build metro-trains, but forget last mile connectivity, which leads to chaos outside many stations, not to say that this gaps increases the cost of transportation exponentially. The disregard is further reflected in the lack of parking spaces, when roads are dug up, and public safety is not a priority.

Everyone wants the economy to grow, and in the process more vehicles be sold. But none want to focus on town planning, and for providing superior civic amenities. It is time we ask ourselves: If we are not able to provide the amenities and infrastructure that complement our development goals, and which focus on civic infrastructure and services, should we reassess our economic aspirations?