I STOOD in the immigration line at Jinnah International for 20 minutes and barely moved. Every counter was manned. Then they changed the officer at mine, and I was through in seven. Yes, I counted. The system was not broken. The system was fine.
Last October, Omer and I returned to find chaos at immigration. It was everyone for themselves. The officer who eventually took my passport told me they had changed the system that day and none of them had got the hang of it yet. He looked exhausted.
Two days before I flew out, the interior minister paid a surprise visit to this airport. He inspected the counters and asked passengers about their experience. While he was standing there, the immigration system went down. Mohsin Naqvi picked up the phone, called the relevant authorities and had it fixed. He then issued instructions that immigration should not stop under any circumstances, and that a backup should be in place for when the system fails.
In April 2025, the Pakistan Airports Authority signed an agreement with a foreign consultancy to plan, design and install e-gates at Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. A year later, the interior minister chaired a special meeting to review progress on the aforesaid installation, and also approved joint counters, a single-point screening system with the latest technology. The defence secretary also said that modern equipment was being imported to protect aircraft from bird strikes.
A year between signing the contract and reviewing the progress and four months since that review, I walked through the same immigration without e-gates. The jokes write themselves here. I am trying not to make any. Look instead at what all of this has in common. Every item on the list is something to be bought: machinery, equipment, gates, and counters. None of it includes a decision about how many officers are on the desk at two in the morning, or about getting the passenger manifest into an officer’s hands before the aircraft has landed.
The airport crisis is a failure of decisions.
The FIA has published what it says it needs. On its own website, its immigration wing lists manual clearance instead of biometric processing, no access to the airline industry’s advance passenger information system, a shortage of manpower, and a lack of forgery detection equipment. Three of these are not purchases. They are arrangements. They require somebody to make a decision and then keep making it.
So we buy things. That is the part of the problem we know how to solve.
But look at what we won’t solve. The men with slips, walked to the front by airport staff who know exactly what they are doing. Nobody is embarrassed. Not the man, not the staff, not the officer who takes the passport out of turn. Everyone in that queue has watched it happen before. Behind them are men standing in the unaccompanied ladies’ line, and mothers carrying wailing babies with nowhere to sit.
Imagine this is the first ‘face’ international travellers encounter when they land. By the time they leave, they will have fallen in love with the place. They will also have learned to expect this.
Meanwhile, landing at an American airport’s long line is perhaps not as frustrating because one (at least me) is filled with anticipatory dread at which immigration officer you’ll get. But the queue was moving thanks to a woman directing people.
Buy the machines by all means. Build the e-gates. But a gate does not decide how many counters open at two in the morning, and it does not notice when a queue has stopped moving. The woman at the American airport was not better at her job than anyone in Karachi. She had a job. Someone had looked at a hall full of people and decided that directing them was work worth paying for, and then kept paying for it. That is not a purchase. It is a decision, made once and renewed every day, and it is the cheapest item on the list.
It was a young woman in line at Karachi airport who told off a man who was trying to sneak into a queue he was not allowed in. When the man tried to bulldoze his way, the immigration officer at the counter stepped out and told off all the men in that line. One was a poor young man who tried to explain that he was directed into that line by airline staff.
The young woman didn’t realise she took it upon herself to do a job no one had assigned her. And it worked. Perhaps she should man (ha) the line at immigration.
We won’t need ministers to make calls then.
Courtesy: DAWN
