Air India put on notice after three Italians leave Delhi without immigration

Three Italian nationals left India on 4 September without passing a departure immigration desk. The Ministry of Civil Aviation has now sent Air India a show-cause notice that calls the episode a serious security and immigration lapse.

The passengers arrived at Indira Gandhi International Airport at 00:50 on Air India flight AI 1115 from Amritsar. At 01:45 they departed on Lufthansa LH 763 to Munich, a codeshare. The gap was 55 minutes. In that window they did not complete the exit formalities that every departing foreign national is required to face.

The Tribune named them as Surjit Singh, Balwinder Kaur and Gurdev Singh. One of them was in a wheelchair. The ministry's notice, dated 12 September and titled as a violation of the standard operating procedure for hub-and-spoke operations, was addressed to Air India and, according to the Times of India, to chief executive Campbell Wilson.

Where the procedure broke

Air India has been rolling out hub-and-spoke transfers at Varanasi, Amritsar and Ahmedabad so that domestic-to-international passengers can move through a controlled sterile path. The approved SOP sets out how boarding cards are issued, how passengers are segregated, and which staff must check that immigration has actually happened.

In this case the two flights were not covered by that model. The passengers should have come out through arrivals at Delhi, cleared immigration, and only then entered the international departure hall. Instead, boarding passes for both the Amritsar-Delhi sector and the Munich sector were issued in Amritsar. At Delhi they were taken from Gate 39 into the international-to-international transfer area. From there they reached the Lufthansa gate without meeting an immigration officer.

A second failure sat on top of the first. India stopped stamping immigration clearance on boarding cards from 1 September. Ground staff who used to look for a stamp now have to check an electronic record. Sources told the Times of India that Air India did not run that check, electronically or by hand, before the Munich departure.

The lapse was found after the passengers had already left. The Ministry of Home Affairs called a stakeholder meeting. Aviation additional secretary Puneet Kansal chaired a session at Terminal 3 that ran more than five hours. The home ministry has called another meeting for Tuesday.

Why the 55-minute window matters

Amritsar to Munich via Delhi is a common routing for travellers with family ties in Punjab and work or residence in Europe. The new hub-and-spoke design is meant to make that routing faster. Speed is the product. The product only works if the airline and the airport treat a domestic arrival and an international departure as two different legal events.

They are. A foreign national who enters India at Amritsar and leaves from Delhi has to be recorded leaving. The Bureau of Immigration keeps that record for overstay cases, watchlists and later visa decisions. A passenger who never appears at the desk is, on paper, still in the country. That is the security problem the notice describes, even if these three people were not a threat.

The wheelchair is not a side detail. Assisted passengers are often moved along staff-only corridors. Those corridors can skip the public immigration hall. The SOP is supposed to stop that shortcut. On 4 September it did not.

Air India had not issued a public explanation when the notice was reported on 14 September. The ministry has given the airline time to reply. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation is in the loop. No passenger has been accused of wrongdoing. The question on the table is how an airline that issues two boarding passes in a spoke city can later prove that the hub city actually ran the legal check.

For other carriers using the same Amritsar and Ahmedabad spokes, the immediate change is practical. Treat every domestic-to-international transfer that is not on the approved list as a full arrival plus a full departure. Do not move anyone from Gate 39 into the I-to-I hall on the strength of a second boarding pass printed up-country. The stamp on the card is gone. The electronic record has to be read before the jetway door opens.