Four more airports go tag-free for hand baggage

NEW DELHI: Passengers flying out of Goa, Pune, Nagpur and Trichy will no longer need to get their hand bags stamped "security checked", taking the number of Indian airports where this practice has been stopped to 23 in four phases since earlier this year. For the fifth phase, Airports Authority of India (AAI) has identified 27 airports under Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) cover to examine how hand bag stamping can end there too by providing the infrastructure required to do so by the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS).

CISF had carried out trial run for dispensing with stamping of hand baggage tags in two phases at 13 major airports last December and this January. "After the trial run, CISF had suggested certain modifications in the security architecture at the security hold areas (SHA) of airports and installation of necessary gadgets for dispensing with stamping of hand baggage tags to BCAS. Accordingly, BCAS mandated infrastructure to be in place at the airports for dispensing with stamping of hand baggage tag," CISF assistant IG Hemendra Singh said.

The infrastructure required includes: High quality HD cameras at pre-embarkation security check (PESC) points and complete sterile area; Dedicated CCTV cameras with uninterrupted power backup; Video analytics features in CCTV cameras and increasing length of output roller of X-BIS machine.

Wherever this has been accomplished, CISF-BCAS have stopped hand bag stamping. So far in four phases 23 airports have done away with this practice, including all the metros ones.

The 27 airports listed now for starting the process of identifying what needs to be done to stop hand bag stamping include Jodhpur, Port Blair, Aurangabad, Bhopal, Tirupati and many airports in the Northeast like Imphal and Jorhat.