Jumping into Action: Flawed Public Governance

LEARNINGS FROM the Delhi airport T3 congestion incident highlights how we miss the public-governance mechanism in the narrative of the pressure-pot called optics, and forget the need for ensuring accountability.

- Srinath Sridharan

That aside, we need to understand that infrastructure development should not just have physical form being built, but also include processes, systems and the mechanism to ease public usage of such public-goods. It is time to design Infrastructure as a public-service.

What started as a flurry of Twitter complaints about the terrible congestion at Delhi airport's T3 a few weeks ago, soon dominoed into a Union Minister's need to intervene. Of course, he did visit the airport a week before the final solution shaped up and not much happened, until much noise from passengers ensured that it did. But all in all, the crowd handling improved quickly and finally.

For even a rookie process-flow analyst, it would be evident where the problems were. The problems did not arise overnight. One simply needed to staff-the-closed entry points and security gates to speed up the security processing time by adding more equipment, and by adding faster IT systems at the check-in counters and by linking them to the baggage systems, with speedier processing. For an airport that costs many thousand crores to build, all of the above is a rounding-off error in value. Yet we found this nuisance of an issue snowballing to cause inconvenience to passengers for days on end.

Public Governance Failure

While the twitterati and the mainstream media might praise the concerned minister for the "action taken", here is why this incident is an example of misplaced or flawed public governance.