Last week an old friend rang up from Kohima to ask if I could help by exposing in these columns the hardship faced by air travellers in Nagaland. He said the Centre had ignored the state government’s repeated pleas to improve air connectivity to meet growing demands for seats. During his last visit to Nagaland, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is said to have assured the state government that he would look into the matter.

Well, it has to be admitted that for North-easterners in general air travel is now more a necessity than a luxury. With the exception of Arunachal Pradesh, which uses the nearest airports at Dibrugarh/Lilabari/Tezpur (all in Assam), and Sikkim the one at Bagdogra (West Bengal), the rest have their own. (In 1984, the Congress government had announced that Gangtok and Itanagar would soon have their own airports and one wonders whatever happened).

While in Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura airports are located within an hour&’s drive from their respective capital towns, Nagaland&’s is at Dimapur (70 km) and Mizoram&’s at Lengpui (30 km). It is worth recall that the timely commissioning of Lengpui became possible only because of the wholehearted support, cooperation and enthusiasm of the local people who helped clear the jungles around for construction of the runaway because the Mizos were desperate to have Boeing flights.

Air-India is the only airline operating on the Kolkata-Dimapur route and there are now only five flights a week. Mondays were discontinued recently, though the day persisted in being listed in some publications’ timetable for domestic flights, causing confusion. For some strange reason, AI does not operate flights on Fridays. If memory serves right, this has been going on since October 1983 and for “technical reasons”.

Back when a small plane (Fokker Friendship) was in service, curtailment/cancellation of flights due to “technical reasons” was understandable because Dimapur airport was not ready to handle a bigger plane like the Boeing 737. But the scenario has changed and Dimapur is now a burgeoning commercial town with a great demand for air tickets. Students pursuing studies in metropolitan cities have often complained of not getting tickets to or from Dimapur as and when needed. For those failing to get tickets at Dimapur it has become customary to literally “fly” to Guwahati on shared private taxis at night and catch flights from there.

And there have been complaints galore about flights being delayed at Kolkata because pilots are sometimes reluctant to fly to Dimapur citing restrictions on landing and take-off after sunset. In fact, in what amounts to the unkindest cut, there is no direct Kolkata-Dimapur flight. The service is operated via Dibrugarh in Upper Assam and is a combined operation, hence the perennial shortage of tickets. But to be fair, though Dimapur does have a night landing facility it is said to be employed for emergency purposes and when VVIPs drop in.

There have also been complaints of flights often being cancelled, much to the inconvenience of passengers, due to either bad weather during the monsoon, poor visibility in winter or “technical errors”. It is a pity that when the buzzword today is greater air connectivity there is a persistent shortage of tickets. The obvious solution would be to increase frequencies and encourage private airlines to operate on this route.

One more instance of disdainful treatment is evident from a recent report that said that when the departure of a flight was delayed at Kolkata airport, Dimapur-bound passengers were served breakfast while those alighting at Dibrugarh were given lunch packets. So much for priority and fusion fare, given that the plane first lands at Dibrugarh and then continues on to Dimapur! Perhaps in the airlines’ parlance, this would amount to just one more “technical error”.

jbl@thestatesman.net