Srinagar: As the daily number of passenger arrivals and departures at the Srinagar International Airport has been crossing a total of 12,000 to 15,000 since the last few weeks, owing to a huge tourist rush, traffic snarls on the stretch between Humhama junction to the aerodrome drop gate has also grown with each passing day.
Air travellers and other commuters who visit the Srinagar Airport, to either pick up or drop passengers, told Greater Kashmir that an additional travel time of almost 45 minutes to 1 hour is lost due to the traffic jams and congestion from the Humhama junction to the airport drop gate.
“I visited the airport last week to drop off my brother but I was stuck in the traffic jam for almost an hour outside the airport. The queues of vehicles are long enough for causing bumper to bumper traffic for hours,” said Aadil Ahmad, a Srinagar resident.
It may be mentioned that for the last several years, the issue of traffic snarls outside the airport has been taken up during the Airport Advisory Committee ( AAC) meeting, held once in every three months and chaired by the incumbent Member of Parliament from Srinagar constituency.
However, rather than finding a way out to ease the traffic congestion and follow up on the AAC recommendations, the authorities seems to be in no mood to boost the infrastructure in order to ensure smooth vehicular movement in and out of the airport.
Speaking with Greater Kashmir, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Traffic (Rural), Manzoor Ahmad Mir said of late the vehicular traffic to the airport has increased manifold, thus causing the traffic jams. The officer said while number of Traffic Policemen at the junction near the airport to regulate vehicles have been increased but added that a “faster passage of traffic inside the airport finally depends on the security check at the drop gate,”
“The job of the Traffic Police is to ensure regulation and traffic management. It is finally a matter of security checks that becomes a deciding factor on how fast the traffic moves inside the airport premises,” said Mir.
For last several years, officials of the Airports Authority of India ( AAI) have been claiming that the hyper-sensitive Srinagar Airport is proposed to get vehicle scanners, full body scanners and additional x-ray checking machines at the drop gate to make security checks more quicker. Infact last year, AAI in its list of airports across the country, where full body scanners were to be installed had mentioned Srinagar Airport as well.
However, when contacted, Director, AAI, Srinagar, Kuldeep Singh said there was no proposal of either full body scanners or additional x-ray machines at the drop gate as of now. “There is no such plan as of now ( for full body scanners or vehicle scanners),” Singh said.
When asked for the mechanism that is being put in place to decongest the airport drop gate, the Airport Director said efforts were being made to create a flight schedule in a way that air traffic is distributed throughout the day instead of maximum flights operating during the afternoon hours.
“It was quite evident that with the increase in passenger footfall, vehicular traffic inside the airport was also witnessing a sharp increase. We are trying to distribute the number of flights throughout the day rather than concentrating them only in some particular peak hours,” Singh said.
