Nightmare on airport street

Calcutta airport goes from frustrating to fearful as evening sinks into night.
If touts hound passengers by day, passengers are forced to hunt for them by dark. Their “Dada, taxi lagbe?” becomes our helpless “Dada, taxi achhe?”
Metro spent four hours outside the domestic terminal from 8.30pm on Sunday to see how scary it is for someone touching down late.
Manish Sharma, who flew in from Jaipur, thought he would skirt the crowd and buy a taxi ticket from a booth outside. There was a slight problem: the counters were shut.
Sharma started walking towards the taxi stand. There were some private vehicles, waiting to make a killing, but none of them would go to Howrah. They had more lucrative options in hand. A middle-aged man agreed to pay Rs 800 for a ride to Chetla — over three times the normal rate.
Sharma kept walking till he reached the western end of the parking area, where he found over a dozen others like him waiting for a taxi.
There, taxis yellow and white — that should have picked up passengers from the pre-paid stand — were exploiting the need gap to the hilt, demanding rates double or triple the normal amount. Not a single policeman was in sight.
The moment a taxi appeared, scores of people surrounded it and chorused “Dada, jaben?”
“He is demanding Rs 550 for Howrah,” Sharma told Metro. “The last time I came, my brother had come to pick me up,” he added, regretting telling his brother he could manage the home stretch on his own this time.
11/11/10 Subhajoy Roy/The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports Nov 2010