A senior Irish Civil Servant made the observation "The British Civil Service now only exists in two places - Dublin and New Delhi."
Dabolim Airport - or Diabolic as I renamed it in my mind - was a perfect example of the ludicrous nature of procedures for their own sake. India has aspirations to be a global economic player, and, I suppose, because labour is so cheap, efficiency is not regarded as important. Yet, paying public employees so poorly makes them very corrupt. Not in the entirely malign way that corruption is seen, correctly, in the UK, but in the casual acceptance that oils can be wheeled by a little baksheesh. Which is fine if you are a - comparatively - rich Westerner, but not so fair to the poor in this so-called democracy.
It is first necessary to queue outside the airport terminal in order to have your bags security scanned - only your hold luggage. It is then sealed , actually no bad thing, because it deters interference by bag-handlers at either airport. But it also presents an opportunity for the bag-wallahs to see what is in your case. One woman had 400 cigarettes in her case. She pointed out that it was absolutely none of his business how many she took into Manchester. Twenty pounds made it none of his business. The man shipping large quantities of Viagra had to pay fifty pounds!
It is not permitted to take Rupees outside India, and you're informed you also can't use them in Duty Free, so you're faced with changing them at usurious rates. Then we get hit for excess baggage - although that was an Airtours thing not an India thing. I'm philosophical about it, having got away so many times with it. Although they did try to charge us for twenty rather than ten kilos, trying to include our hand baggage in the total.
Next stop was Immigration and Customs. Despite having obtained our Visas prior to travel, we had still, nevertheless, to fill in an additional piece of paper for Immigration prior to landing. Incidentally, this had amused me, because there was a multiple choice question for occupation, including Self-employed, Government, business, student etc but the first possible answer was 'doctor'. It seemed to chime with Goodness Gracious Me.
I was pleased to note that all proper procedures were in place regarding Immigration. Michaela Wrong in last week's New Statesman is very amusing on the processes necessary to get a visa for Democratic Republic of Congo.
For a surreal country, a surreal visa application process. Behind the partition at the embassy's offices in King's Cross sit staff who must wake each morning thanking God they escaped a nation in which, since the civil war, nearly four million people have died of malnutrition and preventable diseases. Yet each application is processed on the quixotic premise that outside the door prowl tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Britons just itching for a chance to relocate to DRC.I watched a young Englishman, who had clearly been through this before, try to display his bona fides. He had a ticket proving he would return to the UK. Bank statements showing he could pay his way. A prepaid coupon for one of Kinshasa's most expensive hotels. Vaccination certificates proving he wouldn't infect anyone in the country, which experiences the odd brush with the likes of Ebola and bubonic plague. From where I sat, even the backs of his knees seemed to be pleading. The visa officer leafed through the papers, pretending to suspect him of nursing some secret plan to become an intolerable burden on her phantasmagorical state. "You're missing one paper." She pursed her lips with satisfaction. "You'll have to come back."
I did idly wonder what would happen if we had failed to report to the airport before our six months were up, and whether there was a bevy of clerks in Panjim or New Delhi, or maybe outsourced to a Call Centre in Burkina Faso, ticking off all departures against arrivals.
Then Customs, which seemed an utter waste of time. It's reassuring to see Customs sitting there, but worrying that they appeared to have no procedures to follow, no forms to fill in, or, most importantly, no pieces of paper to stamp, to prove that processes had been followed.
Security was the next hoot. Every piece of hand luggage had to have a label attached to it. When they passed through the scanners they could have that all important official stamp marked on them - remember, the scanners at the entrance to the airport were solely for hold baggage. I was most disappointed that when I was X-rayed and wanded I didn't get an official stamp. We were promised a frisk. I was disappointed that it was merely a wanding. Nevertheless we had to be separated into male and female, and separated from our hand baggage - which made me rather frantic because I didn't want anyone walking off with the thousand pound of geekery in my rucksack. And I didn't have my walking boots X-rayed, which was shoddy. Hey, when I was using the staff entrance at Gatwick South a couple of years back I even had my DMs X-rayed each time.
Next came the Confiscation of the Lighters.
I had to hand over three lighters from my handbag. I was impressed by the procedures. They had a schedule for each flight and thus marked the number of lighters surrendered against each boarding card number. I judged this to be an effective control. Jimmy commented that it meant we couldn't smoke airside. A nuisance, seeing as though it was still two-and-a-half hours until take off - which was delayed for half an hour, then an hour. But I had used the smoking room groundside and it had appeared to have built in lighters.
We went to Duty Free and stocked up. Naturally, each transaction was dutifully written into a self-duplicating ledger, again, an effective control. Except that it didn''t prevent us from breaking International Law by buying five times the Duty Free allowance. Still, there was clear separation of duties and proper documentation.
We went on a hunt for the smoking room, and found it. Outside stood two airport officials whose sole job was to stand there holding lighters for anybody who needed them. It was actually pokier than the smoking room at work; quite a few people remarked it was almost enough to make them give up smoking. Quite a few people, British and Russian, did have lighters, and I suspected there was probably one lurking at the bottom at my rucksack. When I found it, I gave out a cry of triumph. My joy was shared between British and Russians.
Time passed slowly. Flights were announced, to Gatwick, Moscow and Manchester. At the first call a few dozen people joined a slow-moving queue to be joined in dribs and drabs by others. Long before the queue subsided, a second, frantic call was put out, which drew a few more. Next came the 'Last and Final call' which created a third wave. The diminution of the queue to a couple of dozen created a further wave, followed by increasingly frequent and frantic calls "May I have your kind attention. Would you kindly make your way to Gate 1A where your plane is ready for departure." I would so like to abolish the word 'kind'.
The cleaners went round picking up litter. I was impressed by the supervisor who would find where there was litter and point it out to the cleaners, who would then pick it up.
Someone said she was going to reclaim her lighters at Manchester; I don't know whether she tried. It would have been a good compliance check of the careful procedures to record the lighters.
Finally, our plane was called, so, as one, we all headed to the smoking room, and took bets on how many calls would follow the 'last and final call'. I almost felt sorry for the announcer guy: we had seen planes off to London, Moscow and Manchester and we were not going to surrender our hard won seats for the dubious pleasure of standing in a queue that wasn't moving. Finally, it was down to about ten people, so the remaining thirty or so joined it, trying not to laugh at the despairingly frantic tones of the announcer guy - think, teacher who has lost complete control of a class.
Again, the procedures were impressive. We had to show our passports to the guy on the left. And the labels on our hand luggage to the guy on the right. For some reason, one couple had mislaid their 'Security Stamped' labels and were sent back to the beginning to repeat the whole process. Someone remarked that it was unlikely that they could have got so far without their bags being checked and their lighters confiscated. I felt that the chances of slipping an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile into one's handbag to be fairly slim, seeing as though it wasn't even possible to buy a newspaper airside. But then, baggage wasn't sealed against tampering, merely stamped with the Official Stamp. And there was no need to have a stamped label on the Duty Free plastic bag, which I noted as a weakness in controls.
On the bridge to the tarmac we were required to show our tickets to another uniformed official. It was a brilliant juggling game as I wondered whether I would lose something vital out of my handbag, trying to guess which bit they wanted to see. Halfway across the tarmac was another passport check - this time specifically for the Visa. I panicked momentarily, thinking Jimmy didn't have the required number of Official Stamps, but, phew, that was okay. Another official checked our boarding passes before we ascended the ladder, and then finally, the cabin crew looked at our boarding passes with the sole purpose of directing us to our seats.
Dabolim Airport proudly displays signs that it has been certified for ISO 9001. Cynical old me says that that just proves that the procedures are documented. It doesn't actually prove whether or not they work.
It appeared they didn't work, because they managed to let a man board who soon proved that he was in no fit state to travel. Later, people said that they had noticed him acting peculiar in the waiting area.
Still, I think we can be reassured that every piece of paper was correctly filled in the requisite number of times...
