Coronavirus: Kolkata airport makes arrangements for contact- less proedures

Arrangements for contact-less travel and social distancing norms have been readied at the city airport to keep passengers safe from COVID-19, a top airport official said on Saturday. An "absolute contact-less procedure" with "least possible surface touch" will be provided to passengers from the time of entering the airport till boarding the flight under the new arrangement.

Director of N S C Bose International Airport Kaushik Bhattacharya said, "We have taken all measures to keep the entire operations touch-free. We will entirely go by the directives of the Centre in this regard." From collecting boarding pass to tagging of luggage, social distancing norms will be strictly followed and there will be zero contact with personnel at the counters, airport sources said. Apart from temperature checking with thermal guns, the mandatory security check and frisking will be done by maintaining a necessary gap between the passenger and security personnel, the sources said.

Tickets and identity cards will be checked by the CISF personnel without any physical contact. Passengers will be scanned by a machine to match identity cards, during which they may be required to briefly remove their masks. The travellers will not have any contact with kiosks that will dispense boarding passes. Passengers are only required to display their mobiles phones or ticket with an identity card to the person designated to operate the machine.

The passengers will have to collect it after it has been dispensed from the kiosk. There will be mandatory washing of hands before boarding and a gap in seating arrangements inside the terminal, they said.

A passenger cannot move around in the lounge area while waiting for a flight and only basic utility shops will be allowed to open including tea and coffee shops, the sources said. All necessary sanitisation measures are already in force in the airport and disinfectants are being sprayed on a regular basis.

From the handling of cargo carriers to evacuation flight of foreign nationals from the airport during the lockdown period, the airport has been working on a limited scale even during this period, the sources said. The country has been under lockdown since March 25 to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus with all commercial passenger flight operations having been suspended for the lockdown period.

Flight operations to some virus-affected countries like China were suspended even before March 25. Air India has opened bookings for the second phase of 149 repatriation flights under the governments Vande Bharat Mission to bring back Indians stranded in 31 countries from May 16.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)