IndiGoof

WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THE CHAOS AT INDIA'S DOMINANT AIRLINE

- By AVISHEK G. DASTIDAR and M.G. ARUN

IT was the afternoon of December 4, and the Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru had lost all sense of order. The departure boards blinked, then froze. Airline counters stood deserted, as people wandered around dazed and confused. Hundreds of bags lay scattered across the terminal, unattended and unclaimed. It would have been an unsettling sight in any airport, let alone one of India’s busiest. Forty-two-year-old animation designer Rituparna Sarkar stood amid the chaos, clutching a ticket she had booked weeks earlier. She was flying to Mumbai for an international animation festival she had organised herself, hoping to arrive a day early. Instead, she watched the airport dissolve into mayhem. “It was worse than a railway station,” she says. “Luggage from every possible flight was just lying there. Nobody knew whose it was. Nobody was guarding anything.” Airline staff offered no answers. Sarkar remained stranded for 14 hours. She never boarded her flight.

Two days earlier in Bhubaneswar, Sangama Das and Medha Ksheerasagar, both software engineers in their 20s, sat at the airport watching the clock count down to their wedding reception that night in Hubballi, Karnataka. Their IndiGo flight had been put on “delay” since morning till late at night, as relatives and some 700 guests waited in anticipation at the reception venue. Eventually, the airline announced their flight had been cancelled. The couple then found themselves attending their own reception remotely, via video conference.

In the Northeast, Manjuri Palit, a school teacher in her 50s, was stranded at the Guwahati airport on December 5 with the embalmed remains of her husband stored in the cargo hold. She was taking him to Kolkata for burial. All the paperwork, from hospital clearances to permissions from local authorities, had been painstakingly prepared. But the morning flight refused to take off. Embalming lasts only 48 hours. Time was running out.