NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Civil Aviation has put an end to hand baggage stamping in four more airports in the country. Passengers flying out of Coimbatore, Calicut, Indore and Vadodara will no longer need to get their handbag tags stamped 'security checked' in the pre-embarkation checks.
Aviation security watchdog Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) passed an order on Friday for immediate dispension of this requirement at these airports, which takes the total number of airports where handbag stamping is done away with to 17.
“After successful trial run and positive feedback received from the concerned quarters, it has been decided to dispense with the present system of stamping of hand baggage tags... at pre-embarkation security check (PESC) points at four additional airports — Coimbatore, Calicut, Indore and Vadodara — with immediate effect. The airport operator shall ensure that the requisite monitoring system and supporting infrastructure are maintained all through at PSEC points,” stated an order issued by BCAS DG Kumar Rajesh Chandra.
The practice of stamping hand baggage was first done away with in April at the seven major airports-- Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Cochin. Later in June, this year six big airports too scrapped the practice. These airports were Chennai, Jaipur, Lucknow, Patna, Trivandrum and Guwahati.
The idea behind stamping handbags is to fix responsibility in case something that could be a threat to flight safety is allowed to go in those bags beyond a point by finding out the screener whose lapse led to that. Handbag stamped tags have a number in fine print which identifies the counter where the bag was screened. However, this practice does not exist in global countries because the security aspect is taken care of with full camera coverage of the airport premises.
India is among the few still following this practice of stamping hand bag tags. The security agencies plan to end pre-embarkation hand bag stamping at all the 59 airports in coming months.