Conditions at Hazrat Shahjalal airport have certainly improved over the years. Compared to past years, the degree of harassment passengers and their families were subjected to have been reduced significantly. That is a reality we surely acknowledge. However, there are yet areas where things could improve and turn the airport into a spot where people, both passengers and those who go there to receive or bid them farewell, can feel comfortable.
As a report in this newspaper made clear yesterday, there are still a good number of problems related to baggage handling at the airport. It is incoming passengers who, after quite some time spent at immigration owing largely to the high number of flights landing almost at the same time, are compelled to wait for inordinately long periods to have their luggage back in hand. There have been times when weary passengers, arriving in Bangladesh on long-haul flights, have had to wait for more than an hour for their luggage to reach them through the conveyor belts in the arrivals concourse. Indeed, there are stories of people spending more than an hour before they can finally collect their luggage and move out of the airport.
This problem ought not to have been so complicated. It is not right that a passenger who has two pieces of luggage with him must wait for the second piece of luggage to arrive long after the first one. And then comes the problem of the tampering which goes on with luggage allegedly at the hands of airport employees. Our report yesterday cites the instance of an expatriate arriving from Canada and unable to get her luggage on the day of her arrival. When she is informed later that her luggage has arrived, she goes to the airport, only to find that the valuables and gifts she had placed in her luggage have gone missing.
That is enough of an example to suggest that while such criminal acts at the airport may have declined of late, there are yet elements inside the terminal ready to indulge in a purloining of goods from incoming as well as outgoing passengers' suitcases. The airport authorities need to focus on the issue. Besides, officials of the various airlines must be present at the time passengers' baggage are loaded and off-loaded from aircraft of these airlines.
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