A K Bhattacharya: Wanted: A watchdog for airport services

The simple and effective system at Delhi airport has now fallen apart.

For a few months after the domestic arrival lounge at the Delhi airport was rebuilt by its private-sector management, the new facilities there looked impressive. Ignore for the moment the maintenance of cleanliness and orderliness within the lounge, which was indeed a welcome relief, the facilities outside the lounge also showed a distinct improvement.

One of the first impressions a visitor forms about a city after landing there is the manner in which he has to deal with its public services. An airport is the first intermediary that oversees that interaction. The new management at Delhi airport recognised this elementary fact and worked out an efficient system to prevent what used to be a nightmarish experience for visitors to the city — catching a taxi for whose service passengers have already made the payment. The new management used its security guards to create numbered bays for taxis to park there. Every holder of a pre-paid taxi receipt would get a number corresponding to a bay. The passenger would then simply walk towards his bay and get into the taxi waiting for him.

That simple and effective system has now fallen apart. Taxis no longer wait in the numbered bays. Nor do passengers get numbers, corresponding to the bays, on their pre-paid taxi receipts. Mercifully, there is still a queue. However, many clever passengers take little time to sense that the number system is no longer in operation. Therefore, they ignore the queue and catch a taxi even before it can park itself on the bay and head for their destinations.

If you know how to please the traffic cops on duty or even the security guards, your individual initiative will yield better results, while the wait for those standing in the queue gets longer with frustration and anger showing on their faces. The queue has already become shorter, with more people losing faith in its ability to get them a taxi. The system, that became a wonderful experience for travellers until a few weeks ago, is now a cesspool of chaos, confusion and corruption.

How did this happen? It is possible that the new management of Delhi airport, like its state-owned predecessor, has come to the wrong conclusion that airport facilities are only about constructing a decent building and providing efficient services within the terminal. If this were true, it should amend its approach without any further delay. The total experience of an airport is an outcome of both the ease with which it is connected to the city and the efficiency of the facilities inside the terminal building.

The airport regulator, which is now considering a proposal to increase the levy on passengers for the facilities they get from airports, should keep this in mind. Why can’t the airport management consider procuring the services of a private taxi operator to offer a similar pre-paid taxi service as is being run by the Delhi Traffic Police? It is true that a few private taxi services are available at the airport at present, but these are not large enough to create healthy competition for the existing taxi service run by the traffic police.

Consider the huge captive market for taxi passengers (70,000 people daily) that an airport like the one in Delhi offers from morning to the late evening hours. The Metro service connecting the Delhi airport with the city centre may reduce passengers’ dependence on the taxi service. However, the Metro will only provide a point-to-point service and a large number of passengers with luggage will still require a taxi service to take them directly to their destinations.

The larger point such an unhappy passenger experience underlines is how the privatisation experiment is getting embroiled in needless controversies over efficiency issues and for its failure to provide better services than those in airports run by state-owned managements. The point to be noted here is that the problem is not with the structure of ownership, but with the people who manage them. This is particularly true of services which, by their very nature, enjoy monopoly status.

If the Delhi Metro management decided to run an efficient service and raise fares periodically to give it adequate returns to keep the system in good shape, there was nothing in the political or administrative system that came in the way. Similarly, the new management at Delhi airport began well with vastly superior services, but standards are now falling as is evident in the taxi service it oversees, even though it continues to remain under private operation.

The question, therefore, is not whether a private management is better than a state-owned management. In either case, there is need for strict surveillance by an independent regulator who can penalise an errant service provider. The only difference is that imposing penalty on a private sector operator is relatively easy in the Indian system. However, the problem we face is bigger. We need to have strong and autonomous regulators to ensure strict adherence to standards by both private and state-owned managements of services that enjoy monopoly status.