Bloodsuckers: With mosquitoes drawing blood at T2, the most memorable souvenir international passengers carry from the Mumbai airport are mosquito bites
The world-class T2 seems to be giving international fliers a quintessentially third-world experience. For, a hive of mosquito bites are the stinging souvenirs they carry on their bodies back home.
Passengers and visitors at Terminal 2 of the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) complain of the bloody inconvenience due to mosquitoes, especially during night hours when most of the international flights operate.
Frequent travellers and airport staff say the problem has been bugging the shiny, swanky terminal, thrown open a year ago, for a long time, going back to even before its construction. So much so that mosquitoes are the memory that international passengers carry of Mumbai's airport, sources from tourism industry say.
This is hardly a surprise considering the mounting piles of garbage that dot the slums surrounding the airport, in addition to construction debris.
“I was at T2 with my son recently to pick one of our relatives arriving from overseas. However, the mosquito attacks made our wait hell all through,” says Sudhanshu Sinha, a Peddar Road resident. “When I approached an airport staffer, he said he was helpless in such a situation,” Sinha told us.
“The problem had reduced in the past few months, but has reappeared again,” says D P Dalal, a frequent traveller based in Juhu.
An airport official pointed out that all measures are in place to control the mosquito menace.
After the matter was first reported in March last year, the airport operator, for a brief period, closed down some of its water fountains, as mosquito larvae usually breed in stagnant water. The authorities even introduced guppy fish in water logged areas, since they are said to be the best natural eradicators of these parasites.
But all the steps seem to have failed in the face of the sturdy repellent-immune urban-bred mosquito.
An audit of the T2 premises done around the same time by an external agency revealed that rampant breeding of mosquitoes is a result of Mithi river's proximity and a large network of gutters near the terminal
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