Hand baggage tag-free in 5 more airports

The new travel regime for air passengers was launched in April last year by the federal civil airports guarding force in consultation with the Civil Aviation Ministry and the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS).

Passengers check in at the departure hall at Terminal 3 of Indira Gandhi International airport in New Delhi. AFP PHOTO. (Representational)

NEW DELHI: Five more airports have done away with the practice of stamping and tagging passengers' hand baggages, a senior CISF official said on Monday. With this, 42 airports in the country, out of the total 60 under the CISF security cover, are now tag-free. The airports at Khajuraho (Madhya Pradesh), Raipur (Chhattisgarh), Jorhat (Assam), Dimapur (Nagaland) and Shillong (Meghalaya) have recently been included under the hand baggage tags-free security regime that was initiated by the CISF last year, the official said. The new travel regime for air passengers was launched in April last year by the federal civil airports guarding force in consultation with the Civil Aviation Ministry and the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS). In order to create this new system, security arrangements are upgraded with the deployment of smart cameras and re-positioning of security paraphernalia in the airport terminal area. These five airports got these arrangements done recently, he said. The operators of these airports were asked to increase the length of the output roller of the x-ray machine so that the hand bags were checked easily, the official added. CISF Director General Rajesh Ranjan had recently told PTI that the force was working to bring all the 60 airports under the hand baggage tags-free regime by the year end. The old stamping of hand baggage procedure was a major irritant for passengers and they had made many complaints in this regard to airport authorities saying the 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. By having the stamped tags on the hand baggage, the security personnel were assured that no weapon or ammunition-like material enters the aircraft, the official said. It also pin points the accountability of the security personnel who clear the baggage. All these procedures have now been replaced by smart gadgets and hence the procedure to tag and stamp the bags has been done away with, he said.