Advanced baggage check for Bangalore airport soon

Advanced baggage check for Bangalore airport soon
New Indian Express

BANGALORE: With nearly 7500 passengers and 12,000 visitors a day, Bangalore Airport is a logistical nightmare for Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) that oversees airport security.

While all the airlines expect the agency to expedite scanning of passengers and their baggage before they are allowed onto the aircraft, the increase in flights over the next few months will definitely test the agency to its limits.

Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) commandant Udayan Banerjee told this paper that there was increasing demand to clear passengers and their baggage faster. “We need more systems to clear passengers faster.

Advanced baggage clearing systems are being installed at other airports and with Bangalore being a fast-growing centre, it will come here too soon,” he said.

The advanced baggage clearance systems include vapour tracers, which can sniff out explosives and computers that can slice images of any suspicious object. The images can also be enhanced multi-fold so that there is no doubt as to what they are.

If it is still not deciphered, such baggage will not be cleared and will come back to the airline concerned, which will have to then page for the passenger and ask them to unlock the bag.

But what concerns the CISF most is the occasional passenger with a live bullet in the hand baggage. “There have been at least six such cases in the last one and a half years that I have been here,” an officer said.

“Carrying a live bullet is an offence, but as they have valid licences, we advise such passengers to keep them in the checked-in baggage. But no one listens,” the officer lamented.