I have been watching and hearing the number of complaints against the Delhi airport and Delhi International Airport Limited grow as the days go by. Everyone is cursing the Delhi airport. Since I write a column on aviation, friends or acquaintances often ask me - at times as if I am partly to blame - if and when this airport will show some improvement.
I get long detailed emails on the problems faced by so and so while transiting through Delhi. A friend of mine who's Danish and lives in Copenhagen said that this had been his worst airport experience in several years.
It took him 45 minutes just to enter the terminal and another torturous hour-and-a-half before he could board his flight. Exhausted by the queues, his wife and six-year-old son both demanded to be carried. A friend who flies in often from Hong Kong on work and always flies business said it took her 50 minutes just to get in the other day.
It's not just my friends and family who have been suffering. The list of complainants against the Delhi airport is growing at an alarming pace. Almost every other day, The Hindustan Times devotes almost an entire page on the travails of various passengers, incidents and laments the mess at the airport. The Mumbai airport, by contrast, appears to be a modern saint which works with clockwork efficiency.
Why is this happening? Are DIAL and GMR, which is spearheading the process, so inefficient? I asked a senior government official how Mumbai has stolen such a march over Delhi, considering it was slower to get off the ground, and whether this was entirely due to the failure of the private sector company to manage the situation.
He said things were, in fact, way better than what they might have been. He argued that passengers should be thanking their lucky stars. If the same situation has occurred with the AAI in charge, going by their past record, things could have been a lot worse.
He asked me to imagine trying to stuff 200 people in a hall built for 100. What will happen? It will appear to be bursting at the seams. Entering and exiting the hall will take inordinately long. People will be all over the aisles and even the steps. Tempers will run high as everyone jostles for space. And the owner of the hall will watch in despair while earning a bad name. This is the situation that the Delhi airport finds itself in today. It is built to handle 13 million passengers. This year it would have handled 24 million.
Given that this was the harsh truth, what was DIAL doing, I asked. Were they just twiddling their thumbs while matters got worse? What improvements had they introduced and why on earth could no one see them?
Safety, for instance, has been enhanced with new fire engines fitted with sensors for zero visibility operations and new runway friction testers. Apron lighting for night operations has been vastly enhanced.
"Retro reflective" lighting, he said, had been introduced for safer aircraft and vehicular movement. ICAO-compliant signages and runway guard lights had been introduced for more efficient aircraft movement. None of these will impress passengers. Who cares about safety till a crisis occurs? Runway rubber deposit removers have been introduced to ensure the runway operation is smooth and the runway is no longer closed as often or for as long as it used to be. Imagine the delays and chaos if it was.
Similarly, inside the terminals, a team of customer service staff has been deployed for passenger assistance but they are clearly lost in the crowd. So are the new queue managers who are meant to regulate passenger flow.
The new X-ray machine in the terminal used by Jet and the LCCs is so swamped with luggage that no one noticed it's new. There's even a new Nirula's in a cramped section of the private airlines departure terminal but getting to it is even more of a challenge than getting to your flight.
New comfortable seats have been imported from VITRA, Switzerland, but since you can never find one, who will ever know? Fifty-two new LCD flight information displays have been put in, but very few find the time to look up.
Ride on sweepers have been introduced to keep the place cleaner but the sheer numbers and the Indian tendency of treating any available space as a dustbin defeat the purpose. Sixteen customer feedback kiosks have been put in place but passengers - besides being too harried - are sure to miss their flight if they stop to give feedback. There's a new coach running between the two domestic terminals but that's a bit of a joke, considering the volume of passenger traffic would justify a monorail.
What will passengers notice? More check-in counters, more boarding gates, more immigration counters, more security channels, more X-ray machines - all of which needs space. But a new terminal building with space can't come up overnight.
In other words, it is, to use a cliche, a "no win" situation. It is a bit like renovating and expanding your house while living in it. The sum of many parts may eventually make a whole. But till the whole is visible, all the parts simply make no sense.