Chaos at Bengaluru airport as international passengers line up for mandatory Covid tests

Chaos and confusion reigned at the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) here on Wednesday, the first day of the union government’s revised guidelines for inbound overseas passengers.

All international passengers arriving in India must produce negative Covid test reports and show their travel history for the past 14 days. Travellers from Omicron-hit countries must also undergo Covid tests upon arrival in India. No inbound overseas passenger can leave the airport or take connecting flights before the test results are out.

Authorities at the city airport were clearly overwhelmed by the implementation of the rules.

Since Tuesday midnight, as many as 1,600 international passengers arrived at the KIA on eight flights. Of them, 1,191 passengers were from 12 at-risk countries and the remaining 409 were from other nations or domestic flyers who had flown from international destinations to other Indian airports before landing in Bengaluru.

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All of them tested negative, according to Dr Thippeswamy A, the health officer of the Bengaluru Rural district, where the airport is located. Passengers can take the rapid RT-PCR test (it costs Rs 3,000 and gives the result in an hour) or go for the regular test, which costs Rs 500 and takes five to six hours to deliver the result.

But scenes from the airport told a different story.

Although the district health office deployed 25 staffers and four doctors at the airport for the surveillance of both domestic and international travellers, there was only one testing counter, run by the city-based lab Auriga Research Pvt Ltd, to screen all the passengers.

Social-distancing measures went for a toss as passengers stood in serpentine queues breathing on each other. Seating arrangements were grossly inadequate.

Many passengers took to social media to narrate the “absolute chaos” at the airport. One Twitter user said: “Wait time at Kempegowda International Airport is infinite for passengers coming from overseas. The queue time is longer than that for Balaji Darshana. Sad to see people waiting outside to receive their loved ones.”

Another passenger tweeted thus: “There is lack of proper information, coordination and there are redundant data checks. We still haven’t got out of the airport because even rapid tests are taking more than two hours to get the results. Sort yourselves!”

To add to the rush of passengers, the Auriga website crashed and many passengers could not pre-book a slot for testing.

A third passenger tweeted: “I have booked and paid but the form did not allow me to pick a date and slot. No reply on email either. I have got the registration numbers only without date and time.”

In a statement released late on Wednesday evening, Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) said the service provider running the laboratory at the airport experienced “some delays” in processing test results owing to a high volume of passengers who had to undergo RT-PCR testing.

It promised that the lab would scale up the operations in the coming days to cater to the increasing volume.

Curiously, the BIAL said 1,228 international passengers arrived at the airport from at-risk countries during the first 14 hours of Wednesday. This figure is a tad higher that that given by Dr Thippeswamy (1,191).

None explained the mismatch.

Two per cent of passengers from non-risk countries were also picked up for random testing.

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