Mar 31, 2017: In a bid to speed up the check in process, the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) has decided to do away with getting the hand baggage tag stamped from April 1.
The seven airports are Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Cochin.
In December, CISF had started trial runs for this but stamping was resumed after a week due to security concerns. The BCAS had in February issued an order announcing that the procedure was to be done away with but the CISF had at that time object to immediate implementation of the plan. Following this, a joint meeting was held to iron out issues.
Recently, CISF had conducted trial runs in two phases at 12 airports and concluded that stamping of baggage tags could be dispensed with after certain modifications of security architecture in Security Hold Areas of the airports and installation of high definition CCTV cameras. These modifications were required to make sure that passengers could not access bags containing restricted items which are segregated by CISF personnel for checking.
CISF had collected the feedback during the one-week trial run. During the trial run from December 15-22, security check areas were monitored through CCTV cameras to ensure no passenger skips the mandatory check.