Delhi airport chaos: Wading through a sea of humanity at T3

NEW DELHI: “I am late.” These were the thoughts as my cab drove up to Terminal 3 at Indira Gandhi International Airport on Wednesday morning at 7.15 am. The airline had advised passengers to reach T3 at least three-and-half hours before take-off time and mine was to leave at 10am.
Also See: All you need to know about Delhi Airport Chaos
The elevated road was lined with bumper-to-bumper cars and after the driver, with some effort, managed to find a spot to let me down, I ran towards the gates.
Entry gates 1 to 5 had long queues and the ushers were redirecting passengers to other gates with fewer people. In early December this crowd management was missing at the gates and caused a bit of chaos. At the gate, the young CISF officer on duty made my day when he saw my government-issued press ID card and beamed, "I’ve been reading TOI since childhood. It's a habit and I have ensured my children do too."

Having web checked-in earlier and with no bag to drop, I ran towards the domestic security hold area which was, as expected, bursting at the seams in the morning peak hour. I joined the queue around 7.30am with hundreds ahead of me. Knowing that CISF has to carry out meticulous checks on every person and baggage and Indian airports are yet to install full body scanners and 3D computed tomography X-ray scanners which don’t require electronic devices and liquids to be removed from backpacks, I won’t complain about the pace at which the line moved.
But for sure standing in a queue as serpentine as this one was an experience. Everyone talked about the overcrowding at the terminal. Frequent flyers had the unhappy bragging rights about how they had to undergo this ordeal so often now. Poor souls!
Every now and then an anxious individual rushed ahead, pleading their flight was about to take off. Many of the queue jumpers were polite and apologetic, but there were others who felt their accented English was their privilege pass. People in the queue were wonderfully accommodative, well mostly. At this point, my only solace was that there were now hundreds in the line behind me.
There were jokes and wisecracks in the queues, one of them being that Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) should host a film festival and use the billboards to screen 75-minute movies for passengers idling in the queues at peak hours.
About an hour later, I finally reached the e-gate where I had to scan my boarding card QR code. Despite maximising my phone brightness, the gate didn't budge. The private security agent there asked me if I was trying to scan the QR from a screenshot. Yes, I said. He asked me to use the boarding card mailed by the airline instead. It was khul ja simsim!
Then came the moment to grab the trays and deposit electronic devices, chargers and power banks, belt, watch, wallet, liquids over 100ml. There were queue breakers here too. Patience ran thin. You heard testy "Line se aao. Hamari flight nahin hai kya?" and phrases of that ilk several times.
At 8.40, I finally cleared security and retrieved my bag from screening. Still in good time for my flight and feeling triumphant like Mumbai Docks coolie "Vijay" Amitabh Bachchan after bashing up the goons in Deewar. I had time for some window shopping and then stopped for a coffee to reward myself for my patience of the past hour.
“Bhai, kya bheed hai” — I narrated my early morning adventure to family and friends and realised it was 9.10am. So, I made a dash for the boarding gate to double check if I was at the right gate (the flight number was not displayed by then), only to be told the takeoff was delayed, possibly because so many flights were taking off in the same period, also the reason why the airport was overcrowded.
A word of advice to people who have flights at peak hours out of T3: download DigiYatra App and use it to enter the terminal quickly. Do a web check-in. Hopefully, the government directive to airlines on manning the check-in and drop box counters will expedite things. Carry only one cabin bag or at most an additional laptop bag or ladies' handbag. Avoid peak hour flights till mid-January. If not, be ready to stand in the queues for anywhere up to an hour and a half.
DIAL is opening three more frisking lines and CISF has posted 100 more personnel. But once peak season travel begins the coming weekend, the infra crunch at India's biggest airport will keep hurting passengers. Relief will come only when the T1 expansion is completed in the coming months.