About 40 employees at the Digi Yatra facility at Surat International Airport went on strike last Friday.
The employees cited salary delays as the reason for the protest. The strike led to about 1,000 passengers having to undergo manual entry checks. Every day, about a third of the nearly 3,000 passengers who depart from Surat use Digi Yatra.
As per sources, the salaries of the employees were held up after the Airports Authority of India (AAI) gave the Digi Yatra contract to a vendor with a cancelled GST number. Since the GST number was no longer valid, AAI was not able to process necessary payments, leading to a delay in staff salaries.
Earlier, AAI had seemingly cancelled a tender for the same service. When the tender was reissued, AAI officials, once again, failed to verify the vendor’s GST compliance before awarding the contract.
As of now, the Digi Yatra facility at Surat Airport has not yet been officially inaugurated. For several weeks, the pre-launch trial phase has been underway, with thousands of passengers enjoying a contactless, paperless check-in system.
