PTI
NEW DELHI
CISF Director General O P Singh said the paramilitary force will begin a week-long exercise at Goa, Varanasi, Pune, Bhubaneswar and Vishakhapatnam from next Monday to see how stamping of handbags can end at these airports.
“The trial will now begin at these five airports,” he said, adding the force proposes to initiate this people-friendly measure at all the airports under its cover, by the year-end.
From June 1, six more airports in the country, including Patna, Chennai Jaipur, Guwahati, Lucknow and Trivandrum will do away with the practice of tagging and stamping domestic passengers’ hand baggage.
“We had run a trial at these six airports for a few weeks. After finding that an enhanced number of new gadgets, CCTVs and security paraphernalia has been put in place, the process of doing away with the tagging and stamping of domestic air passengers’’ hand baggage will begin from June 1,” the DG said.
The Central Industrial Security Force had first initiated this new system at seven airports of Delhi, Mumbai, Cochin, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Ahmedabad from April 1.
The force is tasked with guarding 59 civil airports in the country.
By having the stamped tags on the hand baggage, the security personnel used to be assured that no weapon or ammunition-like material enters the aircraft with the passenger and now with the deployment of smart cameras and repositioning of security paraphernalia at the six new airports, the same objective is being achieved.
The procedure remained a major irritant for passengers and they have made many complaints in this regard to airport authorities saying this system poses hassles for them as it consumes time and in case they forget to get it tagged, security personnel would ask them to go back and get it done.
The output roller trays at the six airports, which will initiate the new drill, have now been extended in order to provide more visual clarity to the security personnel on duty on each and every bag even as they have been instructed to minutely go through the x-ray images before clearing the
handbags.
