SITA plans to augment manpower as it sees more opportunities in India

Global airlines IT solution provider SITA plans to augment manpower at its Gurugram-based Global Competency Centre as it looks at more opportunities in the domestic market, according to a senior company official.

Currently, the centre employs around 400-500 workforce, excluding the ones working with its various offshore partners here.

"We are in discussion with the Airports Authority of India (AAI). In fact, we are bidding for some opportunities that would upscale AAI," said Maneesh Jaikrishna, vice-president (Indian subcontinent, Dubai, eastern and southern Africa), SITA.

The AAI is upgrading technology at its around 80 airports and SITA is working for 40-45 of them, he said.

"So, if you see that kind of job, this would definitely require additional manpower. So, we will definitely be augmenting that," Jaikrishna said.

He added that the Gurugram-based centre, which is the largest among all such centres of SITA globally with around 400-500 workforce, not only provides services to customers but is also building, developing and testing software.

Besides, it is also catering to SITA's offshore partners in India.

"We have similar centres at other places also but not of the size of the centre in India.

"And, this centre does a lot of things like managing order preparations. We are also developing and overseeing some of our offshore partners that we have here and helping them to co-create solutions," he said.

Last month, the Mumbai airport put in place a QR code-enabled contactless check-in mechanism for the passengers, which allows them the use of their mobile phones to remotely operate check-in and self-bag drop kiosks for printing boarding passes and bag tags.

Deployed by SITA, the touchless technology solution helps in reducing passenger contact with kiosk surfaces.