BIAL...

Today's Hindu features a house panel report on the shoddy workmanship exhibited by the builders of the Bangalore International Airport. There are two news articles in the print edition today and I tried looking at the elaborations of shoddy workmanship in those articles, but I couldn't find any. Its a 124 page report it seems, but all that the news media has picked up is following -

1. Profit making by one of the promoters by trading BIAL shares

2. The facade of the exterior of the airport not showing the culture of Karnataka or India for that matter

3. Hold Narayanamurthy, Rajiv Chandrashekhar et al responsible for such lapses

I have looked at the google news results for BIAL also, but seriously I don't find anything else in the news reports, and I am especially interested in looking at the elaborations of the poor workmanship. I would also like to the see if the house committee looked at the delay in building the approach road(s) to the airport (Why am I asking about road(s), there has to be A world class road first!). The approach road which is available now is certainly not world class so to say. There were some discussions on building a Airport Express Metro also, did the house committee look into that?

If we take the experience of a traveler starting from the time he or she gets out of his/her home and reaches the final destination, the experience is certainly not world class while he or she is in Bangalore (except for the Vajras). I hope the house committee would have looked into it, in that entirety.

Talking about BIAL only, if we had set our expectation of getting a Heathrow in our city, then BIAL has certainly not met that expectation. If I have to compare it with HAL, then BIAL is certainly bigger, wider, better managed. The cleanliness quotient is higher; the check-ins or the baggage claims are quicker. For peak hour traffic, one would get pissed off by the time it takes to clear the queues, but then even the Delhi Airport on a Sunday evening resembles a railway station (a better managed one of course) just by the sheer number of people inside the airport premises. I still find the queues moving faster in BIAL and I doubt if our VIPs would have ever experienced those queues.

Btw, this also reminds me of the delays in the commissioning of the airport where people, bureaucracy and politics played a huge role. I am sure people have forgotten those days and the issues, so they need not feature in the house committee report as well...

Comments

Rain-In-The-Face said…
I thought so too! I didn't see any qualitative comments there. Though, to be fair, I haven't used that airport as much.
9:33 PM
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