CISF will undertake massive training of its personnel for better protection of aiports

The CISF will no longer carry out airport security drill of asking people with disabilities to remove their prosthetics or making passengers get up from their wheelchairs for screening, a top official said. In a major decision aimed at easing air travel woes of those who are differently abled, the Central Industrial Security Force will use explosive trace detectors and visual profiling, said CISF Director General OP Singh.The CISF took the decision to undertake a massive training of its personnel to usher in the new regime at all Indian airports under its cover following a recent meeting with differently abled activists, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security and other stakeholders.It will also conduct a country-wide survey to find out how many such passengers travel by air each day. "The aim is to ensure that such passengers do not face any humiliation or uneasiness when they travel through Indian airports. We have seen numerous complaints in this regard," Mr Singh told news agency PTI."What we have decided now is to use explosive trace detectors and the visual profiling method of the passenger and his prosthetic tool or wheelchair rather than asking them to take out everything," he said.An ETD is a smart machine which sniffs explosive particles or traces present in a device and gives an alert. According to Mr Singh, the current procedure of asking passengers to take off their prosthetics before boarding a flight and displacing those on wheelchair, so that it can be put in a scanner, will only be used in "select cases or in case of suspicion".

"We are soon going to issue a fresh list of standard operating procedures to usher the new regime in a uniform manner," he said. "We will also conduct a survey at all the 59 airports that we guard to see how many such passengers we receive on an average. That will give us a fair idea as to how to go about implementing the new operating procedures."A senior official in the CISF airport sector said passengers with prosthetics will be asked to remove them only under compelling circumstances which will be purely security concerns. The same procedure will be adopted for wheelchair-bound passengers and those with other disabilities.