Managing Flow

DECEMBER 2003 - For a country whose most characteristic feature is the burgeoning number of people it has, Pakistan is the most ill equipped to manage these numbers in any given situation. As the population simply continues to multiply at an alarming rate, the resultant disorder and chaos spills over into all areas where people converge. Add to that the wayward policies of those who guide and plot our public lives and the lack of basic planning and commonsense and you have a lethal and deadly combination. Those amongst us who have the misfortune to sometimes see beyond their noses can be forgiven for sounding the alarm bells.

Lahore for instance is no longer a stranger to the winter fog, romantically named though any Lahori who lives and still breathes in this polluted city will tell you it is simply smog or the net result of the collective pollution that we produce and spread around the city throughout the year. What is summer haze of polluted air particles laden with all the kind of muck you wouldn’t want to think about, is winter fog and when the temperatures come floating down, so does the pollution. There is sits like an oversize and grimy quilt that blankets the city, reduces visibility to nothing and creates mayhem on the roads.

This week, the smog season was ushered in on Monday morning as Lahore woke up to see that most of its neighbourhoods had sort of disappeared in the night. While the rest of the city might have managed as best as it could, those who were preparing to alight at the fancy Lahore International airport or planning to board a flight out, were in for some nasty time. As is usual, the airport was shut down till 10.30 am and all incoming flights were diverted to Islamabad, Karachi or Peshawar. When the skies opened a little at about 2 pm, half a dozen flights descended gratefully to land at the hi-tech airport that we built just about this time last year. In the concourse hall, which incidentally has no seating and no waste disposal bins of any kind, there were more people than those deployed on the President’s security detail. Given the Pakistan culture of a dozen people seeing off or receiving one person, the numbers had swelled to unmanageable heights. The first casualty was the much touted parking area, which overflowed and resulted in cars and vehicles parked at will wherever there was half an inch of space. Vehicle owners, parting with Rs 15 at the check in where the queues were getting longer and longer then spent the next hour searching for some space. In the end, people do what they do, when there is such disorder. They simply followed their own rules. In the freezing concourse hall, the scene resembled a public rally at Mochi Gate, which I suppose it was, in a manner of speaking. Some people had been waiting for hours and those who had done all the checking still ended up waiting for up to 4-5 hours. There was no cafeteria, no coffee or tea machines except for the rumours that the departure hall on the first level had an outlet where you could polish off some cholesterol-laden sweetmeats. Not quite what the doctor ordered.

When this airport opened, having cost far beyond anyone’s estimates and having taken an extraordinary time to build, people said that it had cost twice as much as Dubai airport and offered a tenth of the facilities. Others said this was high exaggeration. The rulers of the land who had conceived this project, Mian Sahib of the Motorway fame, had planned a far more opulent airport with domes and buildings straight out the pages of the Arabian Nights. When costs started to break out of the roof – naturally everyone associated with this venture wanted their two bits of lolly, the domes were mercifully dropped, but the result is still an airport that is high on looks and abysmal on performance. Having lavishly poured money into high gloss marble floors and ostentatious ceilings with an overload of decorative mishmash, the airport has compromised on all that makes airports efficient and orderly. There are reportedly three baggage carousels in the arrival hall and only two were functioning on Monday. When six flights landed, one from Rome, New York, Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Bangkok – the system collapsed like a house of cards. Passengers having endured hours and hours in the planes or worse, parked at runways like cattle, then had to endure the nightmare of locating their baggage. There was pushing and shoving, fights broke out and trolleys became weapons of mass destruction. It was not only the baggage that had gone haywire. A man I met moaned that his son and wife arriving from different destinations to Lahore were now in Peshawar and Karachi respectively with little hope of finding their way to the airport. There was again reportedly, only one customs counter that was operational. Passengers who had arrived on flights at 2 pm could not exit from the halls till 5 pm. By this time, there were no radio cabs to be had or any of the money-gobbling yellow cabs. The rent-a-car outfits had simply run out of cars and there were waiting lists there for those wishing to further torture themselves. More scuffling and pushing and shoving and bad temper followed.

The CAA, which defies all who dare it and who are lords and masters of all the airports they can see when there is no smog, cannot be criticized or made to see reason. While they earn enormous amounts of revenues from airports such as Lahore, they refuse to allow accepted standards of traffic management to be introduced here. The ILS system that Lahore airport needs is rubbished on the ground that fog is only for 15 days and the additional expense on the ILS system required, is not justified. Agreed maybe, but why waste so much money on domes and floors and useless art. What are the considerations then? When Lahore opened last year the CAA boasted that it could handle 6 or 8 jumbo flights at a go. Even if it was 6 and not 8, what happened on Monday was a serious breakdown of the system. Baggage carousels are not high tech so why does the airport have so few already? With more passengers traveling in the future, what ordeals will be unleashed on the people because the CAA finds more carousels unaffordable? This is worse when Lahore is touted as the next hub after Dubai. Banish the thought. This is the work of people who are out of touch with ground realities. Any amount of money has been spent on this airport and stories of corruption are rampant. Those who know what was going on claim that only a fraction of what was budgeted and made available went into the airport. Most of it found its way miraculously into various pockets. The low level of facilities that Lahore Airport offers and the sad absence of standards are not new to our people who have endured this kind of nonsense all their lives. As someone quipped on Monday, ‘this is just the old Lahore airport. Nothing has changed.’