Bhubaneswar airport soon to get rid of handbag stamping

Bhubaneswar: A trial run to stop stamping of handbags will begin at the Bhubaneswar airport from June 5 as per Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) sources. The week long trial will only be for domestic flyers, said CISF officials.

Beginning June 1, five airports - Chennai, Jaipur, Lucknow, Patna, Trivandrum and Guwahati, will end stamping ''security checked" on handbags of passengers of domestic flights.

O P Singh, CISF director-general said it will also begin trial of ending handbag stamping for a week at five airports including Bhubaneswar. The other four airports for the week-long trial are Varanasi, Goa, Vishakhapatnam and Pune where stamping of handbags will be stopped temporarily for now and may completely stop later.

CISF had also stopped handbag stamping at Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Cochin from April 1.

Singh said the handbag stamping will also be done with for international flyers in future. The CISF chief said that increasing number of surveillance cameras and 24x7 power back up will help ensure safety even without stamping screened handbags which rather delays the checking in process for passengers.