A month after chaos reigned on Indian airports owing to fog and weather conditions, the government has begun cracking the whip. One of the reasons identified for the crowd mismanagement, especially at arrivals in major airports, is delayed check-in baggage.
The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) has now asked seven airlines to ensure at six major airports that check-in bags are delivered within 30 minutes of the aircraft arriving. Officials said airlines could face action if they do not implement the directions by February 26.
The order
A letter written on February 16 by BCAS to seven airlines — Air India, Indigo, Akasa, Vistara, Spicejet, Air India Express and Air India Express Connect — asks for “implementation, within 10 days, of the required measures to ensure that delivery of the last baggage is made within 30 minutes as per the Service Quality Requirements of Operation, Management and Delivery Agreement (OMDA)”.
This is the second letter to airlines by BCAS in the last two months. “We have been monitoring the situation for the last two months. Civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia is concerned about the trouble that passengers were facing. The IATA guidelines and the OMD agreement all make it obligatory on the airlines to ensure that the last checked-in baggage is received within 30 minutes. This was being violated openly,” a ministry official said.
The trigger
In the first week of January, the conveyor belts at Delhi airport’s T3 overflowed as international passengers waited for more than an hour to get their bags despite screens displaying that the last bags had arrived. The scenes were no different for domestic passengers. A quick check by BCAS revealed similar woes for passengers at all major airports.
Scindia — who faced political attacks including one on X by MP Shashi Tharoor — asked for better check-in baggage management as one of the measures to reduce crowds. Officials said the minister started a process of dialogue with airports, airlines and other stakeholders to reduce congestion. Amongst the suggestions given was to take down a few lounges and commercial areas at the airports to create space for passenger movement.
Action Taken
Soon, BCAS began week-by-week monitoring of how airlines were handing check-in baggage.
“In weekly monitoring it was found that the response was better in the initial two weeks but by week 4, baggage delay was noticed again,” a senior officer in-charge of monitoring told CNN-News18.
The airlines have been asked to implement the measures at six major airports — Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru — in the first phase. CNN-News18 has learnt that airlines have had multiple meetings on the issue with the ministry and BCAS. Sources said while airlines blamed infrastructure in some cases, including inadequate number of conveyor belts, in most other cases the ground-level agents have been blamed for the mess.
“BCAS started the continuous exercise of monitoring the time of arrival of baggage at belts of six major airports in January 2024 under the leadership of Union Minister of Civil Aviation & Steel Jyotiraditya Scindia. Since the beginning of the review exercise, performance of all airlines are being monitored on a weekly basis and have improved but are not as per the mandates,” a MoCA spokesperson said.
BCAS will push the airlines to implement the baggage handover time limit across all airports in India once the issues at major airports is resolved, officials said.
Airport congestion has been a concern for the government, especially since December 2022, when airports like Delhi and Mumbai saw a sudden spike in passenger footfall leading to passengers missing flights in some cases due to delays.
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